Branding
The Future in Flagship Retail: A Strategy Update
In the middle of global store lockdowns, 100+ lifestyle brands announce the opening of new flagship stores.
Versace, Puma, Under Armor, Gucci, Saint Laurent, Montblanc, Adidas, Lacoste, Dior, Hermes, Supreme and more report new flagship store openings. All that adds up to retail investments of US$ 200m (assuming standard buildout cost and store sizes) in a time when the internet is booming.
Evolution of Store Design II
In this article, we dive deeper into how brands can best appropriate their spend and decipher how intangible elements of a brand’s identity can be rolled out across store formats and concepts to create clarity of brand, irrespective of size or location of the store.
The “Next Normal”: Rethinking The Brand Business Model
The Brand Business Model for many established brands and retailers has sadly not been enough to deal with the Next Normal
It’s failed to stop many closures even before the pandemic, and Covid has only accelerated this trend.
Post Covid Brand Strategy – Best Practice Round-up
Post Covid Brand Strategy: Discover the latest insights and emerging best practices across the brand and retail industry, from e-commerce and digitalisation to low touch strategic sourcing and creative social distancing implementations.
This quarter saw us return to our regular publishing schedule after a Covid-19 induced break. Our contributors have since focused on sharing their insights on emerging best practices for the ‘new normal’ in a post Covid-19 brand industry.
Cheese Please! A Lesson in Brand Building
How to turn cheese from an every-day commodity into a sought-after lifestyle brand? Join us for a brand building lesson from Cheese & More by Henri Willig.
Let’s Talk About Product
Clear brand delivery is the ‘sweet spot’ that enables brands to stand out and succeed in a crowded marketplace. It’s built on three pillars: product, services and culture. Today, we talk about product.
How does product shape brand experience? How can a brand’s product experience create a meaningful connection to its customers?
BIOGENA – a unique retail concept and multichannel execution at its best
How the small Austrian company shook up the distribution of an entire market
How Important is Diversity for Successful Retail?
Research shows that diversity and inclusion make businesses more successful. Diversity in retail matters across leadership, workforce, workplace culture, marketing as well as from a consumer perspective.
Study after study demonstrates how crucial diversity and inclusion practices are to a company’s success. This article examines what these insights mean when applied to the retail industry. (more…)
Strategic Brand Management at its Best
Shoppers love unique products and great brand stories. If on top you sell upcycled products, are a niche company from a small country, that makes all the ingredients for a great brand story. For us that delivers great learning on strategic brand management.
If someone had told you in 1993 that someone would manage to turn truck tarps into it bags in Seoul by 2019, and create a best practice brand development story in the process, you may have questioned their judgement.
Rapha is not a brand, it’s brand community management at its best
How does a small UK cycling apparel brand become the global benchmark for brand community management? Here’s why brands around the world use Rapha as a best practice case study.
In case a cycling jersey isn’t yet part of your casual wardrobe, this story about brand community management may change that when bike apparel may well set trends in mainstream clothing by 2025.
Global Retail Best Practice
The likes of Amazon and Alibaba open tech-heavy brick & mortar stores, but best practice commercial brand retail still happens elsewhere.
Early sales reports indicate that 2018 was a good year for large parts of the lifestyle brand industry. Almost 4/5 of the top 100 European and US American lifestyle brands had a growth year, and for the most part did better than in 2017. This was despite a global department store fallout and online growth and was largely based on store growth.
Growth Market Cruises: Where Are the Brand Co-Operations?
The cruise industry is growing constantly, and those taking a cruise are mostly affluent potential buyers of lifestyle products. Why are brands not tapping this booming market for their own growth yet?
Brand Development for the Future: Back to the Basics
Successful brand development relies on getting three key factors right: having a unique selling proposition (USP), working with the right people, and creating simple and lean processes.
The brand development has grown in sophistication, but also in complexity. Every one of the 20 odd years I’ve worked in this industry has made clearer what allows some companies to succeed and what others lack. New distribution channels and fashionable management philosophies notwithstanding, focusing on these three success factors is essential.
Update Your Brand Management Reading List
As the summer holiday season kicks in, we’re here to help you get your brand management reading list for all those long flights up to date.
Choose from our curated reader favourites from this past quarter for topics as diverse as the latest trends in edited retail, high and low tech fashion size finders, an update on fashion retail in India, creating memorable store experinces or Adidas’ Global Cities strategy. We’re sure there’s something for everyone. (more…)
Branding in 3D: How Edited Retail is Catering to the Attention Economy
Technology and new expectations have made confident, purposeful ranging a more valuable asset than ever before. In the attention economy, edited retail rules!
Utah is, perhaps, one of the last places you might expect to find achingly trendy sneakers and urban wear. Yet for KITH, the arid terrain of Canyon Point UT is much more than a lookbook location. (more…)