Retail Marketing - Shopping Center Marketing

As principal of a commercial design firm that specializes in retail, restaurants, hospitality and corporate spaces, it amazes me how fast sustainable design has become the hot-button topic in the industry. Collaborating with developers, engineers, municipalities and builders has always required architectural firms to keep costs lean by reducing waste, but over the past few […]

From its modest beginnings in 1942, in a tiny garage in Mumbai, the Asian Paints brand has grown in leaps and bounds over the last few decades. With a focus on product innovation and quality through a consumer-centric approach, Asian Paints has achieved a leadership position in the Indian paint industry. Today, the brand has […]

I’ve always admired 3M. They are the people who invented scotch-guard, post-it notes (unless it was really Michelle) and heaven knows how many other incredible inventions. Their history is one of innovation until recently as flagged by a ‘brand infiltrator’ friend of mine.
A couple years ago a smart photographer and friends […]

As a retailer, the last thing you want to happen is to lose customers. Without realizing it, you may already be losing them. Are you doing any the following?

Lack of Product Knowledge

When a customer asks a question, are they met with a blank stare, lots of information, or a “let me find out and […]

Even if you haven’t yet shopped for a smart car, it’s hard not to see them (cute as they are) and wonder: Who really fits in those tiny vehicles? Can I even fit my groceries in one? Could it withstand a collision, even at a low speed? Does it hold enough gas to get me […]

Brand managers are fond of lists showing how their brands stack up against the competition.  The same is true for nation branding.  But how do you rank a nation brand?  How does Germany’s brand stack up against Singapore’s? Or France’s against the UK’s?
Simon Anholt, a nation branding expert who advises governments on such issues, […]

Cause-related marketing can increase sales as much as 74 percent in certain consumer-goods categories, and consumers spend twice as long looking at cause-related ads than generic corporate ones, according to a study by Cone and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, MarketingCharts reports.
The 2008 Cone/Duke University Behavioral Cause Study finds a strong link between […]

Only a company the size of Wal-Mart could become a global paradox. With a massive amount of global customers and even greater capacity to provide them with desirable products at low prices.  Wal-Mart now finds itself in an interesting position: How does it compete with past success? Chinese manufacturers, US consumers, labor unions, and everyone […]

Arguably, the king of cheap chic is US retailer Target. Faced with intense retail competition years ago, Target chose “to reposition itself as a mass merchandiser of affordable chic goods,” according to professors Patrick Barwise and Sean Meehan, co-authors of the book Simply Better (Harvard Business School Press). While Kmart was approaching bankruptcy and Wal-Mart […]

Search Engine Journal produced a comparison between two free Facebook branding tools: Facebook Groups, which enable users to cluster around a shared interest; and Facebook Fan Pages, which are like a personal profile page for companies.
Two major distinctions were made:

Fan Pages are visible to unregistered users and are indexed by the search engines. Starting one […]