Retail Marketing - Shopping Center Marketing

Businesses love gift cards.
But with so many gift cards out there (from Chili’s to Nordstrom), how do you distinguish yourself from the rest of the pack?
Home Depot thinks augmented reality could be the way. With Home Depot’s new gift card, the giver creates or uploads a customized video to the Home Depot [...]

Not only has Banana Republic been working in overdrive on creative approaches the past eight months, but it has been testing, testing, and testing some more. Long trapped in a format of simply presenting offers and highly image-based email campaigns, Banana Republic has not only hit its stride, but also stepped [...]

Now that it’s a possibility, allowing consumers to purchase goods directly through social media seems like a no brainer for retailers. But it doesn’t come free of cost.
As a new study from Omniture shows, marketers choose Facebook as their preferred method of interacting with consumers in social media. And new tools are letting merchants sell [...]

NEW YORK - Kids under 13 aren’t allowed on Facebook, but that hasn’t stopped many of them from joining.

Togetherville, a social network for kids ages 6 to 10, hopes to lure them into a more age-appropriate setting. The site, whose founder has three children under 10, launched Tuesday night.
It’s [...]

Welcome another start-up interested in telling the world what you buy.
Swipely, which like Blippy lets users link their credit or debit cards and share information about their purchases with friends or the Web at large. It has begun invitation-only testing this week. It wants, it says, to “turn purchases into conversations.”
It’s [...]

Voucher Cloud is an app developed by Invitation Digital that allows users to get discount vouchers straight to their mobile, as well as locating nearby businesses with special offers.
To make things easier, Voucher Cloud takes your current location via GPS and serves up the offers closest to you. This seems to [...]

Like the computer in the movie “2001,” Facebook is struggling to keep its profiles from virtual extinction at the hands of its arch enemy - the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine.
The Suicide Machine is a clever Web site out of the Netherlands that was designed to free users from their social network lives on Facebook, Twitter, [...]

Did you ever want to know your measurements down to a hundredth of an inch?
If you’re ready for such honesty, Unique Boutique in Long Beach has the tool for you - a body scan that measures you at 200,000 points.
The purpose of the procedure is for the customer to have better information to buy or [...]

Not to be outdone by tech visionary Jack Dorsey — one of the brains behind Twitter — and his Square cellphone payment start-up, point-of-sale  veteran VeriFone struck today with the announcement of PAYware Mobile.
Not dissimilar from the Square iPhone application and accessory, which The Times profiled last week, PAYware targets small businesses with its subscription-based [...]

U.S. consumers are shopping via cell phone more than ever before. According to Deloitte’s 24th Annual Holiday Survey of retail spending and trends, published in October 2009, one in five shoppers plan on using a mobile phone to assist with holiday purchases, from researching prices and other product information to actually buying presents.  Retails Systems [...]