News and Analysis

BUST: Why Do So Many Sports Stores Declare Bankruptcy? Street Fight

BUST: Why Do So Many Sports Stores Declare Bankruptcy?

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Among the MULO (multi-location) sporting goods stores that filed for Chapter 11 during the past decade are: Mountain Sports (50 sporting goods and apparel stores in seven states under Eastern Mountain Sports and Bob’s Stores brands) Olympic Sports (70 stores) Modell’s (153 stores) Sport Chalet (47 stores in California, Arizona, Nevada and Utah) Sports Authority […]

Amperity and the Power of First-Party Data Street Fight

Amperity and the Power of First-Party Data

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Amperity is a customer data platform that excels at helping brands unify and organize their first-party data using an average 30 different sources. Making sense of this data helps brand marketers understand when the same customer target shows up across disparate digital systems and lets them know the person is not three or four different […]

LOMA Platform Boosts Hyperlocal Marketing for Franchises Street Fight

LOMA Platform Boosts Hyperlocal Marketing for Franchises

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If LOMA knows anything, it’s how to support franchise businesses. Since launching last September with a $2 million pre-seed venture capital round, the data-driven platform is ready to take the next step in supporting local marketing efforts. (LOMA stands for “local marketing.”) In recent weeks, LOMA launched the first enterprise software platform for multi-location franchise […]

Commentary

How to Overcome Roadblocks in Your First-Party Data Roadmap

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What is holding brands back from developing robust first-party data strategies? Often, the roadblocks can be attributed to uncertainty, accessibility, and structure. While daunting, these are not insurmountable barriers.

The Challenge of Brand Alignment with Social Issues

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Increasingly, brands with high public visibility must articulate their positions on issues the public cares about while avoiding the appearance of exploiting public sentiment for purposes of self-promotion. And whether or not a formal statement makes sense on every issue, companies should be prepared for the day when a consumer comes to them to ask a question or offer feedback about a brand’s actions or values, perhaps in the form of a social post that is there for all to see.

Three Best Practices to Reduce Acquisition Costs and Increase Lifetime Value

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Retail media networks have a significant role to play in helping DTC brands engage with their audiences while bringing down customer acquisition costs. To reduce user acquisition costs while driving lifetime value, brands also need to figure out exactly what to measure and how to understand target customers.

Latest Posts

Yelp Provides Peek into Local Commerce Misinformation and Other Bad Practices

Yelp Provides Peek into Local Commerce Misinformation and Other Bad Practices

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Everyone tuned into local commerce knows that fraudulent local reviews are a problem. But how big is the problem, and what can marketers and platforms do to diminish it?

5 Martech Trends That Will Define 2023

5 Martech Trends That Will Define 2023

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As the US follows in the EU’s footsteps, privacy regulations will only play a larger role in marketing in 2023. While the GDPR is still the strongest privacy regulation to date, we will see an increasing number of regulations in the U.S. The best marketers are agile and should be using the coming year to make preparations for the loss of third-party cookies. One thing is clear: decisions must be strategic, privacy-centric, and backed by data.

Study: Consumers Skittish on Spending in 2023

Study: Consumers Skittish on Spending in 2023

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Strong labor markets and a growth in wages have helped consumers maintain spending on discretionary items until now, but a new study released by the National Retail Federation and Affinity Solutions paints a less optimistic picture of the year ahead.

Catalina Collaborates on In-Store Promotions with Kroger’s 84.51° Labs

Catalina Collaborates on In-Store Promotions with Kroger’s 84.51° Labs

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The shopper intelligence firm Catalina and Kroger’s retail data and analytics unit, 84.51°, are collaborating on a solution that will deliver Kroger’s digital promotional offers to customers who shop exclusively in-store.

Agencies Are Embracing ChatGPT. Is That a Mistake?

Agencies Are Embracing ChatGPT. Is That a Mistake?

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In SEO expert Andrew Shotland’s view, most agencies aren’t saving as much time using AI to develop creative content as they might think. Tools like ChatGPT are fast, but they aren’t particularly accurate. That’s a major problem, especially for agencies trying to create hundreds or thousands of local pages for national brand clients.

How Brands Can Use Apple Business Connect to Reach Local Customers

How Brands Can Use Apple Business Connect to Reach Local Customers

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With access to Apple Maps Insights, multi-location brands should have a much better sense of which locations are performing well, which ones need attention, and how performance is trending over time.

Super Bowl LVII Ad Landscape Shaped By Economic Uncertainty

Super Bowl LVII Ad Landscape Shaped By Economic Uncertainty

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With so much economic uncertainty in 2023 — including mounting layoffs at tech giants like Microsoft and Google — Sol Marketing CEO Deb Gabor believes advertisers may choose to focus on promoting small-ticket items during this year’s game, like snack foods and beverages, while brands selling big-ticket items are largely out. 

Why It Matters that Home Depot Reportedly Gave Meta Shopper Data Without Consent

Why It Matters that Home Depot Reportedly Gave Meta Shopper Data Without Consent

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The Home Depot-Meta incident imparts a broader lesson about the limitations of basing a data privacy strategy on the collection of first- or zero-party data.

Is Sustainability the Latest Retail Marketing Fad?

Is Sustainability the Latest Retail Marketing Fad?

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While countries like France are laying down the law regarding sustainability in fashion, retailers across the U.S. are preparing to capitalize on consumer interest in eco-friendliness as a marketing tactic.

Why the US Government's Google Lawsuit Matters

Why the US Government’s Google Lawsuit Matters

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For marketers, the big question here is whether Google’s tools are more useful or harmful — are the convenience and scalable audiences they enable worth the cut Google takes out of the digital ad market, raising prices? This is among the questions Google will have to answer.