Gap Goes Social

Discovery, engagement and advocacy. Those three themes help marketers at Gap get a handle on how the brand talks to consumers and vice versa on social media. Chris Gayton, the San Francisco apparel retailer’s senior director of marketing, and Summer Riley, Gap’s director of customer relationship management, spoke about how these three foci are also helping to direct the company’s digital efforts at the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) conference on social and digital media in New York on Thursday.

Read the complete article on MediaPost.com

Tesco testing full sized virtual grocery display using QR Codes

Tesco’s idea - set up a virtual shop in Seoul’s subway stations, with life-size replicas of their most popular aisles, powered by QR code e-shopping. Point and scan your chosen products with a smartphone while you wait for the next train, pay with a click, and your virtual shopping cart will be waiting at you door by the time you get back home.

You’ve got to see this. Awesome glimpse at the future of retail merchandising.

View the post and watch the video on Thomas Moradpour’s blog

New ways retailers are using the Internet to drive store traffic

by Anna Robaton, Shopping Centers Today

In this post-recession era, retailers are trying to squeeze more sales out of existing stores and relying increasingly on their Web sites to help drive traffic. A handful of chains have become masters of the art, observers say. “Prior to the recession, many retailers relied on new square footage to help drive growth,” said Anne Zybowski, director of retail insights at consulting firm Kantar Retail. “2009 was the year in which online became a real channel for many retailers. A lot of bricks-and-mortar retailers realized they needed to do more than have a Web site on the side. They needed to better integrate it into their organizations and put more resources into it.”

Read the complete post on Facebook.

QR Codes: Mobile Barcodes Come to The Home Depot

Do-it-yourselfers will now be able to do more product research by themselves as well now that The Home Depot is bringing mobile barcodes to its shelves.

The DIY retailer has partnered with Scanbuy to include the codes in store, in print ads and signage.

Read the entire story on Mashable

Retailer Follow Up On Negative Reviews Pays Off

According to The Retail Consumer Report, commissioned by RightNow and conducted online by Harris Interactive in January 2011 among 1,605 online US adults who shopped online during the most recent holiday season, consumers who have a bad experience, will not come back. And more than ever, unhappy consumers are turning to the social web to share their complaints.

However, retailers have an opportunity to fight back and use social media to turn unhappy customers into brand advocates, says the report that shows how retailers are using social media to win back customers and drive buying decisions.

Read the entire article at MediaPost.com

You may not know Acosta, but you see its work every day

It’s one of Jacksonville’s largest companies with $1 billion in annual sales and a payroll of about 17,000 people in the U.S. and Canada. You see the results of its work nearly every day, even if you don’t realize it.

And there’s a good chance you’ve never even heard of this company. Or if you did hear its name, unless you happened to drive by its headquarters building along Interstate 95 in Jacksonville, you thought someone was talking about a local bridge

Read the entire article at website of the Florida Times-Union

Retail sales up, beating forecasts

Shoppers spent more money this holiday season than even before the recession, according to preliminary retail data released on Monday.

After a 6 percent free fall in 2008 and a 4 percent uptick last year, retail spending rose 5.5 percent in the 50 days before Christmas, exceeding even the more optimistic forecasts, according to MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse, which tracks retail spending.

Read the full story in the NY Times

Retail job offers on the rise

As the economy gradually recovers, some big U.S. companies are cranking up their recruiting and advertising thousands of job openings, ranging from retail clerks and nurses to bank tellers and experts in cloud computing.

Many of the new jobs are in retailing, accounting, consulting, health care, telecommunications and defense-related industries, according to data collected for The Wall Street Journal by Indeed Inc., which runs one the largest employment websites. It said the number of U.S. job postings on the Internet rose to 4.7 million on Dec. 1, up from 2.7 million a year earlier. The company daily collects listings from corporate and job-posting websites, removing duplicates.

Read the complete article at WSJ.com

Today expected to be busiest day of the 2010 holiday season for retailers

NEW YORK – Holiday procrastinators are preparing to zoom through picked-over stores, grabbing discounted sweaters and can’t-go-wrong gift cards. If they can get a parking spot, that is. But you won’t hear retailers complaining.

For stores, this 11th-hour dash caps the best holiday season since 2007, and possibly the best ever. With Christmas falling on a Saturday this year, Friday is a holiday for most U.S. workers. That allowed shoppers to hit the stores first thing in the morning.

Read the entire article on Yahoo! News

Shoppers spending more in Christmas countdown

NEW YORK — The malls were packed last weekend, and in many places it’s beginning to look a little like a pre-recession Christmas.

Americans spent more than last year on clothing, luxury goods and even furniture, delivering healthy gains across the board Oct. 31 through Saturday, according to MasterCard Advisors’ SpendingPulse, which tracks spending across all transactions including cash.

The online category continued to be a bright spot. The big exception was consumer electronics, dragged down by deep discounting of TVs. That area was virtually unchanged from a year ago.

Read the entire article at USA Today