No Turn On Red

Last week, Kohl’s discussed some of their holiday marketing strategies with the press. They plan on increasing their spending to capture a larger share of the dwindling holiday sales figures, with increased emphasis on direct mail, e-mail campaigns, and online-only sale prices.

Going into the holiday season, the retailer, which has seen Web sales increase by more than 50% so far this year, is making a big push online as well. It plans to send email blasts out to 15 million shoppers — more than double the number that it had on its electronic mailing list last year — and it’s offering one or two specially discounted items on Kohls.com every day through Christmas.

Their website has started advertising these online-only specials on their homepage, with a callout that went live this week (apparently):

This is a very interesting shift in marketing for the retailer that has, until now, always offered consistent pricing in-store and online. Their marketing campaigns even advertised this fact and, for years, coupons that were sent out to customers, in direct mail, were also good online.

Kohl’s needs to be aggressive in order to increase their market share this holiday season. This is a perfect opportunity for the retailer to utilize a service, like Twitter, to advertise these special, limited-time promotions. It is obvious that they want to aggressively promote these deals as they they are utilizing prime screen real estate to push the deal. It even appears that they already have a Twitter account, although with zero posts. They should be using this to promote the daily deals and reach more people, one-on-one.

The usage of the service would be simply – they’d just need to follow the example that other retailers have set to announce daily deals. I look at the Amazon MP3 Deal of the Day and Woot.com as two examples of retailers using the service to effectively promote daily deals.

Maybe the first step, for a retailer like Kohl’s, is the use the service to promote daily deals and then they can evolve into using the service to engage customers in conversation. I think there is always more room for retailers to use Twitter to reach their customers.

What do you think?

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Handbag Planet is a new store that is launching tomorrow and they are using social media to promote their site launch. They’re giving away 24 handbags over the course of the launch day and entries to the contest are gained through posting about the site to blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks.

The contest and social media campaign must be working as word of mouth seems to be strong on various networks. A search on Twitter returns 6 pages of results while a Google blog search returns close to 3,000 mentions. I’d assume that the positive word of mouth could lead into positive first day sales. If they also offer good customer service and a strong product, they can hopefully convert some of the first day customers into repeat customers.

I’m very interested to see how this plays out, how the website looks, and how their long term prospects look. I’ll sure be looking at the site tomorrow to check it out and, of course, with this blog post I wil hpefully win my fiancee a new handbag. It’s a win-win for all of us.

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One of my local malls, the Monmouth Mall in Eatontown NJ, recently has seen a number of retailers relocate and remodel their stores: Victoria Secret, The Limited, Express, New York and Company, and Hot Topic. Add in the conversion of a Rampage to Forever 21 and new stores being built (Charlotte Russe, Hollister, and Modell’s), the mall is generating excitement with their newness.

The Hot Topic remodel interested me. It’s been 10 years since they opened in their spot that they were in. The new store has better lighting, better merchandise presentation, more excitement, and it is more inviting to shop in.

Not only did they remodel this store, but this is one of the first 10 percent of Hot Topic stores to get the new, reworked layout.

Hot Topic’s dark Goth stores, which were once a huge hit with rebellious teen shoppers, are getting a lighter, brighter makeover as the retailer struggles to pull sales out of a deep hole, the company’s chief financial officer said Wednesday.

“Based on feedback from our customers and changes in the [apparel] industry, we’re changing the look of our stores,” James McGinty told a gathering of analysts at the Piper Jaffray Annual Consumer Conference in New York.

“People were telling us that the stores were too dark, gothic and intimidating to the average customer,” McGinty said.

(More from CNN/Money.)

Over at Lightheavyweight, Finn is talking about talking about how this new layout ties in with lifestyle marketing. To really capture your marketshare, as a lifestyle marketer, you have to evolve with your clients and adapt through the times.

One can create a great shopping experience and display merchandise well, but if it doesn’t connect with the customers, there will be no business. The challenge with lifestyle marketing is not only to create an exciting shopping experience, but to create one that connects. As Finn discusses, I think Hot Topic has done this.

This new layout is a fresh look for the retailer and a needed change. Adapting as the marketplace grows is not only good business, but it is something the retailer needed to do. The last 12 months have not been kind to them:

What I also like is how well their new website design ties in to the new store concept. Brighter colors, better navigation, better presentation of merchandise. Not only does the new site work well and look nice, but it’s a direct reflection of the thoughts that drove the new store layout. This is a great integrated effort to create a cohesive shopping experience across all mediums. This is something that not very many retailers get right and Hot Topic did.

It will take a while to get this concept off of the ground and really reinvigorate the business, but the seeds of growth and change are there for the long run. Watch out for Hot Topic (again).

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In case you didn’t get the BTS memo, the trends for this season are as follows:

You may finish shopping now.

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I believe that, sometimes, good design can be over-thought. Such is the case with the new Jockey logo. It is a clean and interesting design that they unveiled last week. I really like how it looks, actually. The new website they have is realy something nice, as well. It all works.

But to me, I’m lost when they start describing the reasoning behind all of the design ideas:

“Jockey’s new swirl icon is a symbolic representation of the science and math that we are applying in our product development to raise the bar on our 130-year-old commitment to comfort,” explains Ed Emma, president and chief operating officer. “Through body-scanning technologies and cutting-edge fabrications, we are creating best-in-class apparel for consumers and generating positive results for our retail partners and our brand.”

Jockey is employing state-of-the-art body-scanning techniques to yield insights into the anatomical measurements and movements of the human body. Jockey’s first products to integrate this research include Jockey(R) 3D Innovations(TM), a men’s underwear collection introduced this year with a signature red waistband, signifying innovation and featuring the new icon. For women, Jockey is applying the anatomical learning to its Bra Collection.

Along with the alignment of math and science, the new icon symbolizes the brand’s global reach and pursuit of unity and harmony, according to Victor Herbert, chief creative officer, who oversaw the icon’s design.

“The ring in the center is a universal symbol for unity,” explains Herbert. “The seeds of life, which emanate from the ring, are the universal symbol for fertility and were chosen to represent renewal. Jockey has a heritage of innovation, and we are carrying ourselves forward in the spirit of renewal.” These two symbolic elements are combined to form a spiral or barrel vault, a design that illustrates the universal ratios found throughout nature that Jockey designers are using as inspiration for prints and patterns.

“Three vines of life were chosen purposefully,” says Herbert. “People from all cultures associate the number three with the triads of spirit-mind-body, art-science-religion, and past-present-future.” Inspired by nature and ageless mathematical principles, the icon is a symbol of the future, Herbert concludes.

The new swirl icon embraces both the brand’s heritage of comfort and its growth into the future.

To me, that is overkill. I feel bad for the designer(s) who had to sit in a room with all of the pinheads from marketing while they described all of these ideas that they wanted to capture in a logo. I feel worse if they had to sit in front of a computer while some sales guy stood over them saying “move that leaf a little to the right! Now move it to the left! That’s great! Now make it red and blinking! Oh, you won’t do that?”

But hey, the end result is nice so I congratulate them.

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