February 3, 2009 | No Comments »
On February 1 we launched a new blog, Retailing Together, to explore an exciting new phase in history for retailers, their suppliers and their sales reps. Retailing Together is publishing articles about trade shows, guides to basic marketing, commentary from notable consultants, and research about the state of the industry.
December 22, 2008 | 4 Comments »
A recession is part of the normal business cycle, and we will get through this one, just like all of the others. But things will be different in the next business cycle. The change will be an opportunity for the companies that understand it and address it.
This recession has been particularly hard for independent retailers, with many going out of business and many more business failures to be expected in the next year. When the next recovery comes, I think the retailers that will replace those that closed during the recession will be very different.
December 17, 2008 | No Comments »
Today, the Wired Magazine blog The Long Tail writes about the “Rise of the Retail Blogs”, blogs that retailers are moving to the front page of their websites, rather than being buried in the back. The reason is
November 18, 2008 | No Comments »
No one runs a business alone; at the least, every business is engaged in a complex web of dependencies with other businesses and consumers. And, like a marriage, these relationships require attention, nurturing, and a bit of work. Neglecting a key relationship can result in disaster, and today many of those key relationships involve the Internet. As a couple must work together to manage money or raise children, manufacturers and retailers must work together to present their brand images and make sales using the Web.
Apparel manufacturers have long relied on their retailers to sell their products to consumers. About 90% of the apparel market (by company revenue) consists of retailers with revenues of less than $2.5M per year and manufacturers with revenues of less than $50M per year—the realm of the smaller brands and independent boutique retailers. In this portion of the market, manufacturers work with 300 to 3000 retailers each, and the retailers carry products from 25 to 100 manufacturers. The market is very interconnected.
Consumers see this as a two-tier market where they are aware of two types of brands: the brand of the manufacturer and the brand of the retailer. They care about both and have an affinity for both. When consumers use the Web to research a product—and about 90% of consumers do—they will visit the manufacturer’s website to learn about the product, and then they will look for the websites of retailers to find out where to buy the product.
Boutique retailers are small businesses and don’t often have the time, money, or Internet skills to build excellent websites. Since many of the activities required for Web marketing can be centralized, it makes the most sense for manufacturers to drive the Web marketing strategy, creating the policies and tools to help retailers build websites and market products online. Furthermore, since each retailer can have 100 or more manufacturers, manufacturers should work together to create a single system or model for the retailers to use, rather than expecting them to do things a different way for every manufacturer.
This sort of cross-industry coordination is difficult but will be necessary if the smaller 90% of the apparel industry wants to compete online with the larger 10%.
November 1, 2008 | No Comments »
David Jon Acosta gets a lot of goodwill with a t-shirt, and he uses the goodwill to sell more t-shirts, many of them being sold as a result of an editorial on Daily Candy.
October 29, 2008 | No Comments »
Link building is incredibly important when promoting a website, both because the links are a conduit for traffic to get to your website, but also because links improve a website’s ranking in Google. The basic process for a lot of link building is conceptually simple — you just ask another website for a link — but as the web becomes more sophisticated, getting links from many websites has become more like a more traditional process: getting an editorial in a publication. For many of a website’s most important links, link building is PR.
PR Couture has mad this point even more clear with two articles on:
From a (non-ecommerce) business perspective, the primary purpose for a website is marketing, so it is unsurprising that traditional marketing practices would seep in.
