In New Poll, Small Businesses Continue to Struggle Under COVID

      With the holidays looming over retail, the picture is already not looking pretty and we haven’t even reached Halloween yet. 69% of Main Street shop owners believe Q4 2020 will yield fewer sales than Q4 2019. According to recent polling by Boston-based Alignable, the small business online networking startup, 35% of retailers believe they may need to close by year's end unless consumer behavior changes.   Photo by Jack...

The Corona Diaries: Which Retailers will Sink and Which will Swim ?

        Neiman Marcus’ bankruptcy filing wasn’t totally unexpected given the department store retailer has been struggling for nearly a decade. The COVID pandemic has completely altered the customer journey for the foreseeable future. Department stores will not be the only victims to what’s continuously referred to as “these unprecedented times” – the new mantra.   Russ Allison Loar   Russ Allison Loar Since...

The Corona Diaries: Is COVID Marketing Ethical? Just Ask These Brands

      By now, practically every company you’ve ever remotely come into contact with has emailed you about how they are responding to COVID-19, from car sharing companies to private jet providers. The number one overused phrase?   “We’re working around the clock,” which in most cases, is highly doubtful.   Pandemic marketing: Making lemonade out of one very big lemon.   Nevertheless, while most companies spouted the...

Watch This Space: How Blip is Disrupting Outdoor Advertising

      It wasn’t long ago that conventional advertising, whether television, print, or billboard was so prohibitively expensive that only major corporate brands could afford it.   When the internet came on the scene, it looked as though it might make traditional advertising obsolete – or so some thought. For sure, the so-called “superhighway” helped make it possible for virtually anyone to score some advertising real estate.   Outdoor...

Juul Targets Chronic Smokers Over Teens

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Night Fever 6 Chronicles the Global Evolution of Hospitality Design

      In the 1980’s, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager transformed the hospitality landscape with hotels that were not just smaller in scale, but revolutionary in their design. While today, those same hotels might seem campy and even vulgar, they broke the rules and helped establish a new language in materials, color, and the use of space.   Night Fever 6, part of an ongoing series of books from Frame publishers, is a thoroughly compelling edit of some of the...

Marriott Muscles into Home Sharing Space — Should Airbnb Worry?

      More than likely, Airbnb saw it coming: a major hotel chain taking the plunge into the home sharing market.   For Marriott International, it’s a plan that’s been in the works for some time, and now other majors like Hyatt and Hilton are considering the same move.   Like the boutique hotel model, which started as a startup strategy and then was coopted by corporate giants, Airbnb laid the foundation for revolutionizing traditional...

Is ‘Story’ as Innovative as Macy’s Thinks It Is?

      For the last decade, Macy’s has been working in fits and starts at reinventing itself, and most recently this includes buying a stake in Story, the wildly successful New York specialty store founded by Rachel Shechtman.   Shechtman’s concept was launched in 2011 as a 2,000-square foot serial pop-up store in New York’s Chelsea, It was instantly considered groundbreaking for its fanciful themes that were perfect for the Instagram...

Retail 2019: Our Top Ten Predictions

    There were plenty of insightful moments in 2018, those little and sometimes not-so-little indicators that give us a glimpse of what’s to come.   Consider the demise of Toys 'R' Us followed by the resurrection of FAO Schwarz. Or the weird missteps like Sephora’s Halloween “Witch Kits” or Asos’s tiny crop tops for men. But those are just blips on the cultural radar compared with Amazon’s bold moves into brick-and-mortar -- even if their Amazon 4-Star...

McDonald’s Flagship Showcases “Experience of the Future”

    McDonald’s has revealed its latest flagship concept, and it looks nothing like we have seen before.   That, of course, is precisely the point.   The famous Golden Arches become more background than ever before: in the main dining hall, a more shorthand version appears on a back wall.   The 19,000-square foot restaurant in Chicago, Illinois resembles more than a passing resemblance to a late-model Apple flagship, a criticism by...