Hi everyone
Our roundtables consistently rank as one of the most valuable content areas for our Shop.org conference attendees.  At this year’s Annual Summit, we will be having our roundtables occur immediately after a breakout sessions has concluded and in the same room as the breakout session.  The information for the roundtables are now online, so please feel [...]

Most of the current social shopping ideas are lame. They are mostly derivations of either virally allowing users to put links, or very simple widgets, on social sites, or they are copycat social networking sites with some basic ecommerce built in. These ideas are laudable as at least they are attempting new retail concepts, but [...]

“… I wonder if Starbucks has a much bigger problem: its most important brand attribute was a flush economy. Maybe the strength it most relied upon might have been actualized within the four walls of its stores, but it drew on a quality that was outside the stores, and beyond every definition of its brand.”
These [...]

I just uploaded Morgan Stanley’s Technology Trends report by Mary Meeker to Bazaarblog along with my commentary.  In my opinion, this should be required annual reading in our industry.
Enjoy, and I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in Huntington Beach at the Merchandising Workshop!

Fundamental elements of the customer-marketer relationship are changing faster than retailers can adapt. In fact, they’ve already changed! While it seems obvious most of us are only beginning to appreciate something important: How customers interact via the Web with a brand is an experience.
Ok… seems obvious but let’s frame it in a new light that [...]