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Greater emphasis is clearly placed on value and multiple-unit purchases rather than on adding “frills” via merchandising tactics beyond clearance areas and rebates. An interesting aside is that unlike B-to-C customers who have come to expect plentiful free shipping offers, the lack of such promotions does not seem to negatively impact the B-to-B customer’s decision to make a purchase.

The Global E-mail Attitudes Survey of 13,000 consumers in 13 countries across the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific reveals that email’s influence over multichannel purchasing is powerful, with the majority of consumers (58 percent) having been driven to make a purchase in a store or over the phone by a marketing email. And while websites are the preferred place for consumers to opt-in, they are also very willing to subscribe to email messages offline, for example, when placing a catalog order (46 percent), at the point of sale (29 percent) or via SMS text message (13 percent).

Burberry, which has been staking out its claim as one of the most tech-savvy luxury brands around, has taken the wraps off a new ad campaign that allows users to get their digital hands on the clothing and accessories — zooming, dragging and rotating the motion-responsive images in an innovative way. Users can select and control their perspective on the new campaign, showcasing the autumn/winter collection — making the cast members move, for example, to see how a certain handbag or boots look in action.

Brands that use microblogging sites like Twitter to provide real-time responses to the public are winning a higher degree of trust from consumers, according to a study by a leading public relations firm. Some 75 percent of people surveyed said they view companies that microblog — sending short, frequent messages on sites like Twitter or status updates on social networks like Facebook — as more deserving of their trust than those that do not, according to a survey by Fleishman-Hillard, conducted with market research firm Harris Interactive.

A request by the North Carolina Department of Revenue for personally identifiable Amazon.com customer data that could be linked to purchases is unconstitutional because it violates Internet users' rights to privacy and free speech, the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday. The ACLU, on behalf of seven Amazon customers, has intervened in a lawsuit that Amazon filed in April over an information request from the North Carolina Department of Revenue for all the purchase records of customers with a North Carolina shipping address since August 2003, as part of a tax audit.

The Direct Marketing Association is pleased to announce that the Senate three-times rejected a House proposal to drastically expand the powers of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) across all but a few sectors of the American economy. DMA led the charge in the fight to keep these FTC expansion provisions out of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act (H.R. 4173) as the final text of the bill was negotiated by a formal Conference Committee. These provisions would grant the FTC broad new rulemaking and enforcement authority, enabling the Commission to act essentially as an unelected legislature, governing industries and sectors that had nothing to do with the financial crisis.

A host of retailers are stretching their brands into uncharted product categories and into new lines of business. With store expansion on the back burner, retailers are turning to fresh avenues for growth, betting that their brand equity will carry over to new product categories.

Apple fans queued overnight by the hundreds outside stores in the United States, Europe and Japan to snap up the latest iPhone, setting a new benchmark in the fast-growing smartphone market. It sold a record 600,000 in pre-orders in a single day last week, and BGC analyst Colin Gillis expects Apple to set a record for being the first company to sell a million smartphones in a single day.

Combining the forces of social media with email marketing has been under way for some time, with savvy marketers using the two channels to complement each other rather than compete. As companies gain experience in the area, their choice of tactics may change. A survey of small businesses by email marketing company AWeber found the most common tactics implemented last year were tweeting email newsletters and sending out blog entries to email lists. Fewer than four in 10 small businesses were engaging in those activities, and only about one-quarter had email sign-up forms on their social profiles or links within email messages to follow them on social sites.

Clothing maker Perry Ellis International sees a 10 percent rise in industrywide apparel prices over the next two years amid rising commodity prices and higher labor costs in China. "Prices have to go up at some point. The American consumer will have to pay higher prices... It's only apparel and electronics, the items that keep coming down, everything else in life has come up," Chief Executive George Feldenkreis told the Reuters Consumer and Retail Summit in New York.