Point of View: Saks Fifth Avenue

Traditional marketing was all about executing campaigns.

A visit to the Saks Fifth Avenue homepage begins to point us in a new direction. Here, you get to see a brief story hosted by Diane Von Furstenberg (click here).

Now, what would you trust more ... copy in a catalog, or a video that comes right from the source?

You can literally see where all of this stuff is heading ... e-commerce and video and content and social and mobile all fused together.

Social Media is going to require an almost unthinkable amount of content to "feed the beast". As video and content and social and mobile and e-commerce fuse, it will be critically important for e-commerce merchants to be outstanding at content creation, and to be excellent at propelling that information "into the cloud". This becomes the "new marketing" that ultimately complements and then consumes classic direct marketing and brand marketing.

Neiman Marcus To Reduce Catalog Mailings

Courtesy of the folks at Internet Retailer Magazine, read the article here.

You are seeing a parting of the sea when it comes to multichannel marketing.

Retailers like Saks, Bloomingdales, Nordstrom, and Neiman Marcus de-emphasized or eliminated catalog marketing --- and can do so because the interaction between retail and online channels allows them to generate a high organic percentage.

The traditional cataloger, without the benefit of retail, struggles, because as catalog dies a slow death, there isn't a channel that has achieved critical mass, ready to supplant catalog advertising. We may never find one or two channels to replace catalog marketing. We will need to find one hundred tiny micro-channels that, collectively, replace a dying advertising channel.

Retailers Using Social Technology, Community, And RSS

In addition to the Saks Video Catalog, many retailers are using social technology, community, and RSS feeds in interesting ways. Many in our catalog audience are looking for new ways to have a relationship with customers. Let's review a small sample of brands using social technology in one way or another.

Urban Outfitters has an interesting site that features articles, videos, an RSS feed and a MySpace page.

Neiman Marcus communicates fashion via their InSite Blog.

Ice.com's Just Ask Leslie Blog combines customer questions and short features.

eBags uses bookmarks to tag items you are interested in.

Mac Cosmetics, a $274 million division of Estee Lauder, has customers who are literally inventing products for the brand, sharing the ideas on YouTube. Their product development folks should take a peek at this! My wife found the video when searching for ideas on how to store Mac products. Take a peek at YouTube to see how other folks are doing marketing and product demonstrations for you ... heck, this young lady has almost 14,000 views.

Nordstrom has a MySpace page for their BP division.

Paperspine, an online book rental brand, hosts a blog about books.

Zappos is using Twitter to allow folks to communicate about the venerable online shoe brand.

Patagonia hosts The Cleanest Line, a blog for employees, friends, and customers.

Overstock.com offers a diverse array of community-based options.

Crutchfield has a community section on their website.

Burpee Seeds features their RSS feed on the homepage.

Hallmark has an interesting blog for their Shoebox division.

Here's the Shutterfly community.

Use the comments section to share other ways that retailers are using social technology, community and RSS feeds to partner with consumers.

Saks Fifth Avenue Video Catalog: Fashion In Action

Some retailers see the internet as a modern version of television. Saks Fifth Avenue debuted a video catalog, called "Fashion in Action".

One might envision how Saks or other retailers will morph their websites into entertainment/media divisions. For retailers, e-commerce may not represent the future of the internet.

Catalogers: Third parties and the USPS are crimping our ability to market via paper. Nobody is stopping the catalog industry from experimenting in this fashion.