Merchandising

With the beginning of a new year comes all sorts of prompts from brands, infomercials and various social media toward new behaviors — e.g., weight loss, exercise, decluttering, eating healthy, simplifying your financial record keeping, etc. It's also a good time to ask yourself just how exactly your company helps its customers achieve their goals. Is your brand inspirational and motivational enough to turn your customers into doers? Let's look how one brand masters the art of motivation:

As the year comes to a close, take a moment and take stock of how often your products or services delighted your customers these past 12 months. Delight is a verb worth striving for. Here's how one brand lives it out year-round:

Hear that? It's the sound of another Urban Outfitters controversy brewing. The retailer is in hot water over $8 socks featuring the Hindu deity Ganesh. The "UO Exclusive" has prompted President of the Universal Society of Hinduism Rajan Zed to release a statement decrying the use of the religious symbol and asking Urban Outfitters to remove the socks from its site. "Lord Ganesh was highly revered in Hinduism and was meant to be worshipped in temples or home shrines and not to be wrapped around one's foot," the statement reads.

Kanye West publicly dissed Zappos.com during Bret Easton Eliss' podcast, saying, "I got into this giant argument with the head of Zappos that he's trying to tell me what I need to focus on. Meanwhile, he sells all this s-t product to everybody, his whole thing is based off of selling s-t product." Then, the online retailer had what's most likely the greatest comeback in history. The site put up a "S-t Product" page with multiple pictures of a toilet bowl and a plunger for sale for the flat rate of $100,000.

After saying earlier this year that it wouldn't give up its anti-Google advertising campaign, Microsoft is upping the ante by selling "Scroogled" T-shirts, hats and coffee mugs this holiday season. Like the rest of the campaign, created by former Hillary Clinton operative Mark Penn, the eight items for sale in Microsoft's online store target Google for what Microsoft feels is its unfair invasion of user privacy in the pursuit of profits. Here's some of what Microsoft is selling:

’Tis the season! Starbucks has brought seasonal coffee bliss back to its customers with its beloved Pumpkin Spice Latte (known as PSL by its fans). In just 10 years, Starbucks has created a fall tradition that translated into more than 200 million of these beverages being sold since it launched. Here's another product success story — perhaps a bit quieter, but one that also focuses on the branding and merchandising potential of one powerful verb: SAVOR.

Struggling fashion retailer Abercrombie & Fitch said it would expand its women's tops collection, offer larger sizes and more colors, and start selling shoes, in a bid to win back teen customers who have turned to trendier labels. A&F shares closed down 14 percent at $33.13 on Wednesday after the company reported a seventh quarterly fall in same-store sales in a row and warned of a tough holiday season. Analysts and investors have been looking for a new strategy from the company as its shares have now lost about 30 percent of their value this year. 

Canadian athletic clothing company lululemon athletica, which suffered an embarrassing recall of overly sheer yoga pants last spring, is fielding what it calls a small number of complaints over the quality of some of its pants. The new batch of complaints has focused on a couple of styles of pants — Groove and Wunder Under — according to news reports. A lululemon spokeswoman said in an email that the problem isn't widespread, and that only a very small number of customers have complained. 

Broadline closeout retailer Big Lots, which operates 1,527 stores in the U.S., announced that it's shutting down its wholesale operations, which have operated under the names Consolidated International and Wisconsin Toy for 34 years. It was a business that on the surface made a lot of sense: As the wholesale operation's website says, "Big Lots has the power to negotiate the best deals in the business." But operations will cease by the end of the fiscal year, and the company says it's working on liquidating inventory and assimilating it into retail stores in the next 90 days.

As the Boston Red Sox wipe the champagne from their eyes following the team's eighth World Series title, the challenge facing retailers is far more grave than it was back in 2008, for these key reasons: