Channel Surfing

Kiger thinks a distinct advantage of keeping your creative division separate from your marketing department is that you're better able to achieve consistency in your creative endeavors. "You must have creative management that flows over all of the divisions," he says.

While many merchants like to have the e-commerce creative as part of the e-commerce marketing group, and the catalog creative directed by a head merchant or a head marketer, that's not ideal, he notes. "In our case, because we're divided in a way that all the creative is done under centralized visionaries, it works very smoothly."