This focus on the customer built incredible loyalty and connection. They educated every customer, they increased their level of awareness and in the end they became the preferred choice in the category.

If you’re like me most of your banking is done online these days. I go the accounts area, pay bills, move money around and occasionally check out other services, all with no person involved. I then deposit checks at nonhuman ATM machines. I usually only interact when I need something fixed or just plain don’t [...]

This was the time when retail was immediate and visual as you passed one store front after another. Seeing if you could get pulled into the store by what’s in the window.

Rule 1. in building brands is evolve value and keep building on what you have. Most companies that have dumped an old name for a new one to try to “reinvent” themselves have run head on into customer confusion.

The shocking part about the Gap’s disastrous misstep is that it shows their lack of connection to their own consumers, which is incredibly important.

The motivation to protect what’s unique to a specific community, a region, or a particular street has come as a reaction to the mass influx of chain stores in the last 30 years.

I don’t think all multiple store chains are killers of authenticity. Fundamentally, what do they provide that’s not being served to the consumer? And is it real in how it connects to consumers’ experience?

Target’s entry with P-Fresh will add substantially to the already glutted grocery store square-footage in the United States where more and more retailers are competing for the same number of consumer dollars.