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Younger brands that built social responsibility into their businesses from the beginning are establishing new brand-purpose playbooks that demonstrate how a cause or mission can penetrate a company – in spite of its inherent capitalist nature – beyond a marketing campaign, demonstrating instead a dedication to social responsibility.
Amazon has previously offered vendors the ability to bid on the Amazon’s Choice badge by lowering prices, increasing profitability per sale for Amazon and increasing marketing spend, according to sources who received the pitch from the company.
After gathering customer insight from subscribers around the types of wines they prefer over Vinebox’s past three-and-a-half years, and seeing users buying more cases of the individual pours outside of the three-month delivery cycle, Vinebox founder Matt Dukes launched Usual Wines, a private-label brand of wines made in-house. Usual wines, which launched eight months ago, are sold in packs of six and can be bought online and at Usual’s first branded store and wine bar in San Francisco.
Amazon has rolled out a new selling format for brands in its third-party marketplace: Sold by Amazon, a program that lets sellers submit products to be priced by Amazon’s algorithm. Positioned as a competitive advantage to sellers, the new selling format could prove to be a slippery slope.
Nike’s newest venture, a sneaker membership model for kids, is part of the brand’s push to establish stronger direct customer relationships. This time, the idea is to start young.
Brands transitioning their marketing strategies to account for broad awareness-raising channels – which yield little to no insight into attribution or customer data – have to navigate an awkward growing-up phase that requires a reallocation of resources, navigating partnerships, new methods for tracking results and back-end preparation to meet a new level of customer response.
Two months after it pulled its FedEx Express air mail service from the platform, FedEx has ended its FedEx Ground Shipping service. To get items to customers within Amazon’s ever-shrinking guaranteed delivery windows, the company will rely on UPS, DHL and its own network of delivery capabilities, which include its own fleet of cargo planes, delivery trucks and local drivers.
A rent increase was only the final breaking point in a years’ long lead up to Barneys’ bankruptcy decline. A series of business deals saddled the brand with too much debt that led to a degradation of customer service from top-line pressures and a loss of identity helped seal its fate well before rent skyrocketed.
The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in California, is just the most recent action eBay has taken against Amazon. In it, eBay singles out three Amazon representatives who, the suit claims, used eBay’s internal seller messaging system to poach sellers. Beyond those three representatives, the effort involved a network of Amazon reps in multiple countries that conspired to approach eBay’s sellers on the platform and convince them to join Amazon.
With a new model called genetic algorithms, Zappos' lead data scientist Ameen Kazerouni and his team built better term recognition into Zappos’ search that pulls in historical data and quickly picks up on new keywords that are introduced as soon as fashion trends start to pick up speed. In addition to smarter results, customers also see more personalized results based on what they’ve searched for in the past.
Billion-dollar growth requires a relentless marketing strategy, and CMO Sheila Shekar Pollak said that Athleta’s seen the most success in investing in both traditional marketing methods, particularly catalogs, as well as paid social media marketing, where the company has considerably increased its spending this year.
According to president and chief digital officer David Hayne, Urban Outfitters, Inc.’s well-oiled e-commerce and retail machine, as well as its deeper pocket of resources, will be Nuuly’s advantage as it takes on the rental apparel market.
Every brand under the TechStyle umbrella is powered by FashionOS, TechStyle’s proprietary technology platform that powers the e-commerce sites, in-store tech and point-of-sale, customer service, fulfillment centers, media buying, customer acquisition and data science and analytics.
Amazon’s second-quarter sales for 2019 saw net sales increase 20%, to $63.4 billion, compared to $52.9 billion over the same period last year. Jeff Bezos, in remarks to investors, attributed the sales growth to a positive customer response to Amazon’s push to one-day Prime shipping.
A new boom of technology partners have seen an opportunity to seize on this next-stage DTC opportunity: Scale is difficult, and brands, despite product market fit and a customer base, might sink left on their own.
As Trump's increased China tariffs continue to take a toll on the US economy, many smaller DTC businesses are faced with some tough choices. But for most, it's not simply as easy as moving manufacturing out of the country.
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