Editor’s Note: Retail Trends From INNOVATE 2011

4. Experiment with sentiment analysis. This process, which enables retailers to analyze consumers' online comments about their brands in an effort to gather general sentiment towards them, is becoming more popular. Charming Shoppes' Bass, for example, said he works with a company called Clarabridge that performs natural language queries to track online sentiments, and then ties that data back into Charming Shoppes' databases. "We overlay this data over our purchase data, so we can track how much more a customer who gives us a 10 is worth to us than a customer who gives us a three. We then market to these groups accordingly."