Marketing

Those beer-crate nightstands and makeshift curtains are starting to disappear from U.S. colleges as retailers push more-upscale dorm furnishings for the back-to-school season. Dozens of retailers, from Target Corp and Williams-Sonoma Inc's Pottery Barn to boutique website Dormify.com, are marketing aggressively to the college crowd this year. Using oversized catalogs, social media and temporary stores set up near colleges, they are offering everything for the picture-perfect dorm room, including monogrammed towels, state-of-the art storage containers and color-coordinated curtains and pillows.

Target has begun a full-scale push to promote its mobile app, which touts features such as daily deals and product reviews. In this recent video, the retailer uses a busy mom scenario to explain the ways the app can make shopping easier, like built-in shopping lists as well as store and item locators.

Consumer spending is a key indicator of the nation's overall economic health. It's also acutely important for the financial health of retailers, who faced a tepid first half in 2013 and now turn their hopes to the back-to-school season — their second busiest time of year after the holiday season. "We thought there would be pent up demand in the second quarter of 2013, but we didn't see that demand manifest," says Jan Rogers Kniffen, CEO of J Rogers Kniffen WWE.

To capture and capitalize on mobile traffic growth, retailers are eagerly looking for ways to optimize their digital marketing campaigns across various devices. As a result, top investment priorities include a few tried-and-true favorites: email and paid search. According to the Shop.org/Forrester Research study, The State Of Retailing Online 2013: Marketing & Merchandising, nearly nine in 10 (87 percent) online retailers surveyed either already have implemented or are planning to implement mobile email optimization in in 2013, and seven in 10 will optimize paid search for smartphones and tablets (71 percent and 73 percent, respectively). 

Office Depot is directing its back-to-school marketing efforts at teachers by offering them an online tool to help them plan and prepare for the academic year. The retailer is

Competing with an e-commerce Goliath like Amazon.com can be a daunting task, but specialty merchants have some distinct advantages, including the capacity to forge strong ties with shoppers through a brand community. Amazon's online warehouse of products offers little to unite customers around a common lifestyle or passion. By focusing on a particular product category, value proposition or audience, you can provide meaningful interaction and a shopping experience to connect your customers with other like-minded consumers.

Making the most of peak selling seasons today requires technologies that not only simplify store shopping, but also tightly interweave it with omnichannel retailing's digital touchpoints. Major retailers including Sears, DSW, Cabela's and Pier 1 Imports have made significant IT investments that are designed to provide a big return on investment during the 2013 holiday season. 

Pinterest and online shopping — it's a match made in retail heaven. But Nordstrom is trying to bridge the gap between online shopping and the in-store experience by bringing Pinterest to life. According to GigaOM, Nordstrom has begun labeling its "Top Pinned Items" in stores with a Pinterest logo, alerting shoppers which items are the most popular online. The program, currently in place at 13 Nordstrom locations, is a good idea on the most basic level.

For many retailers, Christmas begins in July with preparations for major site traffic events like Cyber Monday. Will your company's site be ready? The time to find out is now, not when your web servers are overloaded, incoming orders have stopped, and frustrated visitors are abandoning their filled shopping carts and rushing to a competitor's site to buy their gifts.

Saks Fifth Avenue is debuting a new marketing campaign, which it hopes will sell shoppers on its reputation as a place for fashion discovery. Themed "Look," it starts this week with the release of its new "The Making of a Look" catalog, a spokesperson tells Marketing Daily. "Our ads, which will reflect 'Look,' won't run until August, and will be featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and local ads," she says. New shopping bags, direct mail, press initiatives, in-store events, digital marketing, social media and visual displays are also scheduled to begin in August.