10 Marketing Lessons You Can’t Learn From Walmart

Posted by Jon Thomas, 19 Nov 2012

This post originally appeared in our November '12 issue of “Live Report from the Future of Marketing,” our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

I’m not ashamed to admit that one of my favorite movies is You’ve Got Mail—a complete rip-off of Sleepless in Seattle, even using the same lead actors (Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan). Ryan’s character runs a small independent bookshop in Manhattan, while Hanks’s character is opening a large retail bookstore with low prices (if only he’d known how technology would change the way we read) just down the block.

In the late 1990s, when the movie was made, this was a common story line. What were small businesses going to do when Borders, Walmart, Kmart and Target moved into town? How could they compete with rock-bottom prices and one-stop shopping?

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Back-to-School Terror, Now Socially Networked!

Posted by Luke Dringoli, 25 Sep 2009
Ah, remember those cheery "BACK TO SCHOOL!" marketing campaigns by J.C. Penny, Staples, Marshalls and the rest of the lot? How they seemed to happen earlier and earlier each summer? Well, it looks like with this season's marketing blitz, retailers decided to jump on the social media bandwagon.
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