“Signet is a company transformed.” That was the message that CEO Virginia Drosos delivered at Signet Jewelers’ first investor day presentation since pre-pandemic 2019. “Signet’s financial health has gone from being an impediment preventing appropriate investment in the business and talent, to being a significant competitive advantage,” she continued. Taking her victory lap, she highlighted key accomplishments since the last investor presentation, including: Investing $750 million toward growth strategies, largely funded by cost …
Just Adding Home Won’t Make Banana Republic a Lifestyle Brand
Banana Republic is a brand with a mission: to build a brand with character and a personality that truly resonates with customers. It had that in spades on its founding in 1978 by Mel and Patricia Ziegler when it was named Banana Republic Travel & Safari Clothing Company, selling the virtual safari experience through clothes. I still remember fondly a safari jacket I bought there. A Short History Banana Republic was an aspirational, experiential brand before those terms were thrown about so frequently in marketing circles. Then in …
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Unified Commerce Doesn’t Guarantee Sales
Department stores have been on an inexorable slide into oblivion over the last decade. Since 2012, department store sales, excluding discount department stores, have declined nearly 50 percent, dropping from $63 billion to $32.4 billion in 2022, while retail overall advanced 65 percent. Notably, no other sector in retail experienced a rate of decline so high. It’s no surprise that a big chunk of those dollars went to online retailers with their sales more than tripling in the decade, from $408 billion to $1.3 trillion. General merchandisers …
Growing Retail C-Suite Vacancies
There’s a growing crisis in retail C-suites. Nobody wants the top job. VF, Adidas, Calvin Klein, Puma, Designer Brands, Stitch Fix and Rite Aid have longstanding vacancies ready to fill. Gap is close to announcing a permanent replacement for Sonia Syngal who left the company in the middle of last year, but it will have another CEO position to fill for the Athleta brand after Mary Beth Laughton makes her exit. And Gap’s chief people officer is on the way out as well. To fill the open slots, board members are moving from their interim roles …
By Canceling AmazonSmile, the Company Challenges Its Consumer Centricity Claim
Amazon just announced it was shutting down its charitable-donation platform AmazonSmile, effective February 20. Launched in 2013, AmazonSmile allowed customers to donate 0.5 percent of their purchase price to the charity or nonprofit of their choice. Shortfall With some $500 million donated to date, the company, in its infinite wisdom, has determined that AmazonSmile proved ineffective despite its good intentions. To soften the blow, Amazon stated, “ To help charities that have been a part of the AmazonSmile program with this transition, …
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How to Differentiate a Brand
The concept of the Unique Sales Proposition (USP) has been enshrined in marketing and sales circles for decades. Advanced by advertising executive Rosser Reeves in the late 1940s and 50s and then introduced into the lexicon in his 1961 book Reality in Advertising, he called on brands to extend their product advertising from product features to the specific unique benefits their product delivers to consumers. The value of a brand’s USP was to move the “mass millions” to buy the product. One of the most famous taglines he is credited with was …
The Vagaries of Today’s Luxury Market
Over the last three years, the luxury market has experienced a whirlwind of change. In the lead-up to the pandemic, the personal luxury goods market grew 7 percent in 2019, reaching $300 billion globally. Then in 2020, it suffered a sharp decline, dropping an unprecedented 22 percent to $235 billion, followed by a remarkable rebound in 2021 to $302 billion, according to the Bain-Altagamma Luxury Study. Throughout 2022 the personal luxury goods market continued its meteoric post-pandemic rise, advancing 24 percent to $376 billion, and the …
Luxury Is Close to a Tipping Point: Balenciaga Takes the Risk
The Twitterverse and the rest of the media world erupted with outrage over Balenciaga’s latest holiday ad campaign featuring children posed with teddy-bear bags dressed in S&M bondage gear and another ad that included a copy of a Supreme Court opinion on child pornography Tragedy is a genre of literature that’s been around since the dawn of time, from the Bible to the Greeks to Shakespeare and onward. The drama unfolds from some fatal flaw in the hero’s character, which is something understood and shared by humanity, such as greed, …
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