This is the story of Kevin Plank: who went from a dusty basement in Washington D.C. to Broadway in 18 years. It’s the tale of the then 23-year-old who started a business in his grandmother’s row house and finished up with a “Brand House” in New York City. It’s the fable of Under Armour, the sports and lifestyle brand that set out to rid the world of sweat-soaked t-shirts and replace them with moisture-wicking microfiber. Last week I visited the brand new Under Armour Brand House (the fifth in the U.S.), smack bang in prime position on Broadway, and in many ways it is the American Dream brought ..read more

The golden era for brand marketers was the time of “Mad Men” ‑ when a snappy slogan or a cute commercial helped to differentiate brands, and build an emotional bond between consumers and their Lucky Strike cigarettes, Chevrolet cars, Hershey chocolate or Playtex bras. As the last season of “Mad Men” floats into the television ether, is the importance of brands also fading to black? After all, this is a digitized age, and back in Don Draper’s day, consumers were simpler and commerce was straightforward. Heck, even television was barely multi-channel. Recently, Y&R’s Global Chief Client Offi ..read more

In the midst of a ‘soft’ retail environment, one store is persuading customers to queue for up to 20 minutes and pay a 220%+ premium for an item that (fundamentally) you could pick up in a supermarket. Madness or genius? I guess it depends which side of the retail counter you’re on. The Magnum Pleasure Store (recently reported on by Inside Retail) is a pop-up concept exclusive to Westfield Sydney, and is in centre for six weeks only*. I’ve stood there riveted on several occasions, observing perfectly sane people happily line up, hand over $7, and endlessly film and photograph the process on th ..read more

Ever since Piggly Wiggly (true name) launched the world’s first “self-service grocery store” in Memphis in 1916, the game for supermarkets has been about increasing speed and efficiency. The hermetically sealed outcome, however, has been that a trip to the supermarket for many shoppers is not a want-to, but a have-to…not something to look forward to, but a task to dread. “That’s completely the opposite of what food is,” says John Mackey, co-founder and co-CEO of Whole Foods, in the current issue of Fortune Magazine. “Food, arguably, over our lifetimes, even more than sex, probably gives us mor ..read more

The Cannes Lions bills itself as the biggest creative communications festival in the world. Starting out as an advertising show 61 years ago, it now sprawls across numerous categories, awarding work in sectors as diverse as “Innovation” and “Promo & Activation.” Two other festivals have used the same exotic locale over the years. The illustrious Cannes Film Festival has taken place annually in mid-late May since 1946. And from 1992 to 2001, immediately prior to the Cannes Lions, was a porn film industry show with its grand prize of the Hot D’Or! Attendees at the Lions joked that following ..read more

FMOT, SMOT, ZMOT…WTF? The first three acronyms are from the lexicon of “shopper marketing,” the last one a humble retailer’s exasperated “what the?” response. What does it all mean? And to use another truncation, is shopper marketing just so much BS from a bunch of (likely) MBA’s? I’ve been asked that question many times over the last few years. And my answer is that, while “shopper” (as the discipline is popularly known) has its fair share of snake oil salesmen, it does have some genuine remedies for retail. So let’s start with the impenetrable jargon at the opening of this column. FMOT, SMOT ..read more

Business is often about ‘exploring the limits of compromise’, as a colleague of mine used to say. This is particularly so if you are running, or contributing to, a company that has been around for a while. ‘Legacy issues’ can weigh you down. So just imagine if you had the freedom to create an enterprise from scratch: to take a blank sheet of paper and express your vision and values clearly and without hindrance. Then picture yourself taking that dream to market in a 2015 way. Chances are that your ‘NewCo’ might answer what Jon Stine from Intel calls the ‘Internet-Shaped Expectations’ of custom ..read more

Something weird happened on an otherwise ordinary Wednesday in July in New York City. A switch flicked. A baton was passed. A change happened. On July 15 2015, a brick and mortar retail icon closed its doors, while at the same time an e-commerce powerhouse had one of its biggest days ever. To me it was a significant moment in the shift in power from offline to online. Let me explain. July 15 was the final day of trading for the FAO Schwartz toy emporium on Fifth Avenue in New York. This was the store where Tom Hanks danced on a giant floor-mounted piano in the movie ‘Big’. It was the place whe ..read more

Detroit is at once the American Dream and the American Nightmare. Built on automotive manufacturing, and turbo-charged by the construction of freeways in the 50’s and 60’s, the Motor City hit potholes in the 2000’s, with the Great Recession, a corrupt local government and a population decline of 25 percent in the first decade of the 21st Century. “The D” declared its bankruptcy in 2013 and as proof of the city’s troubles, what Anthony Bourdain on CNN referred to as “ruin porn” abounds – gloriously abandoned period homes and boarded-up skyscrapers festooned with graffiti – left to rot and be pi ..read more

Some retail outings fill the shopper with sheer dread. “Horrorstör*” takes that notion one step further, by setting a “traditional haunted house story” in a fictional big box furniture retailer called Orsk. The store is eerily close in style to a certain well-known Scandinavian retailer, and the book looks and feels like one of their catalogs. It’s only when you leaf through it that you see the seemingly familiar product illustrations and descriptions turn from innocent to evil. At the start there’s an image of a friendly-sounding sofa called “Brooka”. By the end, the reader encounters a depic ..read more