The Great American Shopping Mall, a truly unique 20th century phenomenon, emerged for the first time in the late 1960s and exploded across the United States over the next three decades. Tracking alongside the interstate highway system and embedded in newly formed and growing suburban communities, the Great American Shopping Center hollowed out downtown retailing districts in hundreds of U.S. cities. Local and regional department stores staked out anchor positions in all of those malls, (mostly enclosed but some open-air in warmer climes) and a …
Management
Corporate Social Justice Is Now a Permanent Feature of the Retail Landscape
Retail, like much of the rest of corporate America, is entering an era of corporate political activism. In the wake of last week’s seizure of the Capitol building in Washington, DC by pro-Trump supporters, Fortune 500 heavyweights are now weighing in. JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are pausing all political contributions to both Republicans and Democrats for the next six months while others, such as the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association are going a step further by are suspending political contributions to all lawmakers who objected to …
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The Future CEO
Ideally, in order to excel in today's fashion and retail marketplace a top senior executive needs to have strong engineering skills to match an experienced marketing background that informs a deep understanding of how to sell fashion products across the world. Add to this, knowledge of all the accounting requirements, investor relations skills and overall management expertise any CEO must possess. He or she also has to report to a board of directors that in many instances is only marginally educated in most of these new-world requirements. Note …
The New Chief Marketing Officer
The average age of a CMO is 52 for the consumer industry segment -- and the CMO position has the shortest tenure of all C-suite executives at 3.5 years. One could argue that struggling to master the dramatic shift in the digital marketplace and evolving consumer trends has made today's CMO position a revolving door. Over the next few years, I predict the average age of a CMO will drop at least 10 years based on the need for highly proficient digital skills, keen understanding of analytics, drastic change in key marketing performance metrics and …
Ten Leadership Lessons from 2020
In so many ways, the date of a new year is arbitrary. In Western societies, we’re still on the Gregorian calendar, but there are plenty of cultures that walk to a different time drummer: Hebrew, Maya, Chinese, Navaho, Islam. Yet it is the significance of a new year to mark time passing that becomes the ritual. One could argue that the whole world was asleep at the wheel in terms of dealing with the ultimate impact of the pandemic. It’s not as though we had no warnings, Bill Gates, the scientists, the UN – a pandemic was a very real …
Classing Up the Joint
Although "nimble" and "agile" aren't two attributes I typically ascribe to the beauty industry, there's something that feels decidedly "fast on their feet" about the way Ulta Beauty and Sephora announced alliances with Target and Kohl's, respectively, just as the pandemic has upended American life as we know it. Surely those plans were percolating well before Covid struck, and we've got several months yet to go before either of these buzzed-about retail ventures actually gets unveiled to the beauty-besotted public. But for this generally …
A Radical Visionary Envisions Nike’s Dominant Future
When you see the image of a swoosh and hear or read the words “there is no finish line” or “just do it,” what brand immediately comes to mind? If your answer is “I don’t know,” then you have been living on another planet. Nike has been just doing it, over and over again, as if there were no finish line. Doing what? Continuously innovating new products to maximize performance; advances in technology that elevate the efficiency and productivity of operations and inventory optimization and distribution to over-deliver to their insanely loyal …
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Levi Builds Community for Over 165 Years
If you go to Levi site, you will read in big, bold type, "Been innovating since the birth of the blue jean in 1873." In fact, 1873 was the year that Levi Strauss & Co. and Jacob Davis received a U.S. patent for an "Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings." By adding metal rivets to work pants, which would be known as blue jeans, they created stronger pants for working men. And over the last 147 years, Levi Strauss & Company has indeed fundamentally innovated across their business model, its products and every operation throughout their …