Marketing

Brands like BYLT Basics that grew up entirely on paid social and site conversion are reaching a new stage of growth. In this interview, recorded at Total Retail Tech last month in Dallas, BYLT Chief Marketing Officer Davide Mattucci shares why brick-and-mortar is such an important part of the premium menswear brand's future. He discusses…

Retail has spent years perfecting the customer-facing chatbot. Faster replies, automated returns, instant order updates, and self-service tools designed to shorten the wait between a shopper’s question and an answer. Every holiday season brings another wave of investment toward the same goal, and retailers have made tremendous progress improving what customers can see. Now, as…

AI should work as a new sales channel, not another platform standing between the small business and its customers. A merchant's store should remain the place where customer, order, and payment data lives. AI should connect to that, not replace it.

Every retailer is hearing the same message right now: use artificial intelligence to create more personalized experiences. Produce more content. Launch more campaigns. Tailor every interaction. For years, personalization was viewed as the pinnacle of customer experience. If brands understood individual customers, the more relevant and effective their marketing became. Then generative AI changed the…

For decades e-commerce marketers built their playbooks around one goal: rank and then click. Artificial intelligence has rewritten that playbook and retail brands are noticing. Shoppers are increasingly asking product- or service-related questions to AI agents/chatbots/search fields that get answered before they reach a website. That's not a shift in tactics, but a shift in…

Prime Day may be an Amazon.com event, but its impact is no longer confined to the online retail giant. It’s become a market-wide retail moment that reshapes what consumers buy, where they buy it, and what they expect to pay — creating new challenges and opportunities for brands across every channel. Despite record-breaking sales during…

In this episode of Total Retail Talks, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Chris Hurt, president and CEO of Build-A-Bear Workshop, a beloved multigenerational brand focused on its mission to "add a little more heart to life," known for its stuffed animals. Hurt discusses his career start at Polo Ralph Lauren and American Eagle Outfitters, and the…

In the U.S. retail market, the customer experience increasingly depends on what happens after checkout. Consumers expect brands to deliver on promises around convenience and transparency, but meeting those expectations requires strong operational foundations behind the scenes. Recent research highlights that retailers improving their total experience aren't simply adding new capabilities; they're strengthening the fundamentals…

According to the recent Muck Rack State of PR 2026 report, an overwhelming majority of artificial intelligence citations (read: about 99 percent) are coming from nonpaid sources. In other words, AI-generated search results aren't picking up paid op-eds or sponsored links, instead focusing on earned media. Even Google searches now include AI overviews, causing a…

Marketing is one of the largest and most variable investments on a brand’s P&L. Yet finance often has less confidence in the numbers behind it than almost any other major area of spend. That gap is getting harder to defend. Retail CFOs are under pressure to improve forecast accuracy, protect margins and allocate capital with…