Marketing

Time flies when you're looking at a Victoria's Secret catalog. Being exposed to sexually arousing images like those in a Victoria’s Secret catalog may slow down the way people perceive time and make them more impatient when it comes to getting delayed rewards, according to a study from Professor Gal Zauberman of the Wharton School and Professor Kyu Kim of USC Marshall School of Business.

Target is engaging Facebook to help determine how half of a $5 million back-to-school donation is allocated. The retailer plans to donate $5 million to schools as part of its “Give With Target” initiative this fall. The two-part giving campaign provides $2.5 million in grants to in-need schools, as well as up to $2.5 million in Target GiftCards to local schools through votes on Target’s Facebook page. The Give With Target campaign will include $25,000 grants to 100 in-need schools just in time for the start of the school year.

This week I conclude this series of columns about big data and what it means for marketers with a seven-minute video. I promised at the end of "E-Commerce Moneyball" that I'd show you the tools that Amazon.com developed internally and leveraged to become the dominant e-commerce market leader. In the video, I deconstruct Amazon's category (landing page) and product pages to identify the features that online retailers can duplicate with some of the big data tools that have come to the market recently.

PriceGrabber just released additional results from its Back-to-School Shopping Forecast, revealing that while consumers are planning to spend more money on back-to-school items this year, they continue to look for ways to stretch their dollar and take advantage of retailer incentives to save. According to the survey, 74 percent of consumers chose free shipping as the top retailer tactic that would entice them to make a back-to-school purchase this year. Conducted from May 22 to June 5, 2012, the survey includes responses from 4,450 U.S. online consumers, with 1,509 of the respondents planning to shop this back-to-school season.

Mark Zuckerberg and his senior management team will spend two days at Wal-Mart's Bentonville, Arkansas home office this week, meeting with executives of the world's largest retailer and discussing ways to "deepen" their relationship. The Facebook team will meet with Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke and his lieutenants on Friday, in the first such meeting between the two corporations’ senior management teams. Zuckerberg and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg will then speak to hundreds of Wal-Mart employees on Saturday at the retailer's monthly meeting.

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