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A Lesson in Retail from Hanoi’s Shoe Street

Is this the toughest retail environment on the planet? On a trip to Vietnam this month I spent a couple of days sweltering through the streets of Hanoi Old Town. The mercury hit 37 degrees and the humidity was thick enough to cut with a…

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Retail Brand Whole Foods Trials Convenience Format in NYC.

Retail Leader Tweaks Brand to Stay in Front. Recently US retail brand Whole Foods launched a new convenience format of their grocery store model. Since Amazon bought the business the upmarket grocery retailer has been active in trialing new formats aimed at different niches to…

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Tiffany Co shows the value of brand – and then take it too far.

The web is ablaze with ‘social commentary’ on Tiffany’s ‘Everyday Object Collection’. At first sight the US$1500 Tiffany 18k gold paperclip is a brilliant example of the power of brand. After-all, anyone can head down to the local stationery store and pick-up a regular gold…

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Breakfast at Tiffany’s – A brilliant brand collaboration

A Delicious Brand Partnership. A branding strategy that is underutilized yet regularly pays dividends is brand collaborations (especially when it comes to food). When co-branding is envisaged strategically and executed with brand sensitivity, the result can be an extraordinary brand experience – introducing new customers…

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Brilliant Brandertainment from John Lewis & Partners + Waitrose & Partners

Wonderful Brand Story-telling. The UK retail landscape has recently welcomed a notable rebranding with launch of the new John Lewis & partners and Waitrose & Partners. Complex architecture and relationship between the two brands aside, the brand design work and typography are stunningly elegant in…

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Your most powerful brand influencers might be right under your nose

Brand ambassadors hidden in plain sight. Influencers have become the newest weapon in the super competitive battle for brands to stand-out. Finding the right celeb or online tribal leader to espouse the benefits of your product has become the new holy grail for brand marketers…

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8 Predictions for the Future of Retail in 2030

A glance into the future of retail. Global Retail real estate business CBRE has produced a forward-looking market research, perspectives and industry insights piece called The Future of Retail 2030, an interesting piece of futurist thinking with some well considered suppositions. The retail industry is…

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A lesson in Branding from online retailer Brandless – #ironic.

Another Retail Disruptor Gets Physical. US online retailer; ‘Brandless’ made waves this week when it opened it’s first physical pop-up in West Hollywood, LA. The proposition of this retailer is an unbranded (plain label) $3-everything approach, taking the private label mindset and disrupting it. Brandless…

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Why Amazon is forcing retailers to finally pay attention to their customers.

Did retail set itself-up for disruption? In Australia we’ve heard alot of talk over recent years of how tough life is for retail brands. There’s no doubt the category is under pressure as competition increases and consumer behavior and expectations shift. In a recent interview,…

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The 8 ways online has changed the way we shop and what traditional retailers should do about it.

  Intel’s global head of retail Jon Stine recently spoke with a group of Australian retail managers ahead of the National Retailers Federation’s annual expo in in NYC. Given Stine works with Intel, he has a pretty strong view on the future of online retail,…

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Merry Christmas from Truly Deeply (and UK retailer John Lewis)

We’ve continued the tradition of sharing our favorite Christmas TV commercials. The festive season is not only an important time for brands to reach-out to their customers to garner their pre-Christmas purchasing, but it’s also a time that audiences are more open to emotionally connecting…

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Amazon’s Australian launch – A radio interview with Truly Deeply Founder; Dave Ansett

Who’s afraid of the big, bad, Amazon? Amazon soft launched in Australia this week to much anticipation. National radio network TripleM spoke to Truly Deeply Founder and creator of brands; Dave Ansett to get his view on what their arrival meant for Australian retailers. You…

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Why physical stores are still so important for retail brands in the digital age

Global Retailer Aldo  – Bricks & Mortar Believers Global footwear retailer Aldo has seen amazing growth to more than 2,600 stores in 100 countries. Senior Vice President of Aldo Group, Nick Martire co-founded the Aldo Product Services division which generated $1 billion in retail sales…

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The Rising Need for Brands to Change and Expand Competitive Sets

Today’s post is an article written by Brandhook, good friends of ours and the sharpest brand research and insights agency around. At BrandHook we talk about the 7 ways consumer behaviour has changed but after attending last week’s Mumbrella Retail & Marketing Summit it was…

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IKEA brand taps into a higher purpose to support the Red Cross in Syria

  Meaningful branding builds deeper customer loyalty An unwritten law of commerce is that we do business with those we like. This applies equally to B2B sales as it does to B2C where it’s often about how much we like the brand rather than the…

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KolesWorth – Revealing the layers of successful SME branding

There’s more to branding than meets the eye Recently a small, independent supermarket opened at our local shopping strip. I was immediately drawn to the name and brand identity which are  naively unethical and amusing in equal measures. It turns out this is the fifth…

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lululemon continue to differentiate with community

Why lululemon is the new breed of brand A few years back I recall seeing a former Nike VP of women’s wear speak. She was asked what was the biggest change she’d seen in that category during her time at Nike. Her answer was the…

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Re-imagining Retail Design – A truly differentiated brand space

Fresh New Retail Design from Japan Tokyo has rightly earned the reputation for a city that thinks outside the square. Japanese design culture is often fresh, innovative and disruptive, and this retail space designed by Nobuo Araki/The Archetype is a bold example. Following-on from The…

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Woolworths free fruit for kids campaign builds on their differentiated brand proposition

Deliciously Good Brand Differentiation Australian Supermarket brand Woolworths have teamed up with celebrity endorser and fresh food campaigner; Jamie Oliver to introduce their latest in store brand initiative – fresh fruit. Launched in-store and driven by an above the line TVC campaign, Woolworths have come…

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Retail Brand Theatre – Buenos Aires beautiful bookstore

Brand theatre proves the perfect differentiator for this Buenos Aires retailer. Found in the Barrio Norte neighborhood of Buenos Aires is this stunning bookshop called El Ateneo Grand Splendid. The bookshop is the latest incarnation of the Grand Splendid Theater, which was built in 1919.…

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The 4 critical numbers to understanding changing consumer behavior for brands

Customer Evolution – The Important Numbers for the Future of Retail Brands Recently I attended a presentation on Global Trends in Retail put on by PWC. One of the speakers was Dr Violet Lazarevic from Monash Business Schools ‘Australian Consumer, Retail, and Services’ Research Unit…

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Apple takes their retail store brand experience to the next level.

Apple Just Picked-up Their Brand Game… Again. There are few things more admirable than someone at the top of their game relentlessly pursuing a way to do things better. Apple have for several years been the number one retailer globally in terms of sales per…

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Australian Retailer Target loses $2b of Goodwill and Brand Value

Brand irrelevance leads to evaporating brand value Australian retailer Target has struggled in recent years to maintain a valued, differentiated consumer proposition in the market.  As competitive pricing has become a table stake rather than an active brand differentiator, mid-market retailers like Target (and the…

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Disruptive online retailer the surprise buyer of Dick Smith brand

Ruslan Kogan to Revitalize Dick Smith Retail Brand It’d be tough to find two hotter topics in the world of brand and marketing than ‘new thinking brands disrupting’ and ‘old thinking brands imploding’. The latest move by Australian online retailer Kogan combines both. The move…

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Veganz Vegan Supermarket – The Engaging Power of Brand Focus

How Brand Focus can be the best Brand Strategy One of the most powerful truisms of branding is; ‘You can’t be all things to all people’. Yet when we think about the supermarket category, and even the innovations in this space of convenience stores, mini-supermarkets…

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IKEA Chief believes we have reached ‘Peak Stuff’ – What does that mean for consumer brands?

Has the West has reached it’s peak of Consumerism? During a recent interview with NPR in the US, IKEA’s Global Chief Sustainability Officer, Steve Howard opined: “If you look at things like oil–well, actually, oil sales have peaked in the U.S. and Western Europe. Beef sales have pretty…

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The world's best Christmas windows from 2015

As we blow the remnants of Christmas cobwebs from our brains and prepare to launch into 2016, we thought we’d indulge in a last little taste of the festive season. With retailers around the world looking to squeeze every last drop of Christmas cheer from…

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Bland Identity – Microsoft Launches their New Brand Identity Design

A Branding Challenge for market Leaders Microsoft has launched the latest evolution of their brand mark at the opening of its new store in Boston. The task of keeping a brand’s visual language fresh and relevant to the market is critical (we recently wrote a…

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