Last evening, Zara, the dynamic Spanish owned apparel chain, opened what is reportedly its largest store in the U.S., right here on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile! (I know, small consolation for losing the Olympics.) Anyway, I happened to be walking the Mile with a reporter from the Sun-Times, and offered a bit of insight into why Zara (and H&M and Mango) are doing so well in the U.S., relative to their lumbering, domestic retail competitors.
Monthly Archive for October, 2009
Not likely — but an upstart company plots to challenge Netflix and its 1.1-million customer base.
Viral marketing reached a new high (or low) with news that Axe — the vaguely noxious Unilever men’s body unguent — is sponsoring street musicians in a
n effort to spread its message. Whatever your sensibilities think of Axe, I think it’s terrific that hard-working and (sometimes) talented buskers now have a trace of corporate backing. BTW, the photo at right depicts another clever marketing ploy from Axe, the check-out-my-butt towel.
From faithful reader Yale Hollander comes this object lesson in how retail and hubris (on a croissant) makes for a bad sandwich.
The new generation of Google smartphones will include fully functioning GPS navigation, meaning you will get maps and turn-by-turn driving directions directly off the phone, no need for a dedicated gadget stuck on the windshield or fitted into the dash. GPS-equipped mobiles phones may be said to represent what Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen calls a “disruptive technology” — i.e., a development that comes along that trips up even well-managed companies enjoying healthy market share. Their products and services are ambushed from below or from the side. For more details, I highly recommend Christensen’s highly acclaimed and readable The Innovator’s Dilemma, which explains how disruptive technologies have upended firms making everything from personal computers to heavy earth-moving equipment.
“Green Monday” is the online equivalent of “Black Friday,” the latter being the day when — at least in fatter times — Americans stormed the revolving doors in search of $15 DVRs and risked life and limb in the process. Shopping online, of course, carries few such bodily perils. Traditionally, the Monday after Thanksgiving has ranked as the #1 e-commerce day of the year, mostly because folks went back to work and, instead of working, hid out in their cubicles ordering gifts over their employers’ T-1 lines, not waiting on their sluggish dial-up connections at home. All that’s changing with higher-speed home connections. Furthermore, for two out of the last three years “Green Monday” didn’t fall on Monday at all — it fell on Tuesday, maybe because fewer people have jobs to slack off at, or because shoppers are waiting a bit longer to buy their holiday gifts.
Just came across an interesting blog post on OpenSalon, now several months old, written by one who thinks about the daily act of buying with zest, curiosity, and an open mind.
…but the San Francisco Examiner gives a nice thumbs up to my last book, The Number, which was published nearly four years and one long meltdown ago.
Ad agency Weiden + Kennedy deserves huzzahs or raspberries (you decide) for setting a Levi’s commercial to Whitman’s stirring verse. What’s next? Folgers coffee, by Wallace Stevens?
