Retail and consumer goods

The Internet promises to give marketing the same boost in productivity that new operational strategies have given to manufacturing.

The ousted J.C. Penney chief understood the importance of intuition.

A second generation of electronic commerce is emerging, one that will be shaped more by strategy than by experimentation. The battle for competitive advantage will be waged along three dimensions: reach, affiliation, and richness.

New technologies can be dazzling. But do they represent the future of retailing? Have the fundamentals really changed?

One startup’s “barely legal by design” business model may force an answer.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly emerging in applications like autonomous vehicles and medical assistance devices, but consumers don't necessarily...

If nothing else, developments in the e-reader market provide substantial fodder for online commentary. It seems that every week features a story in a...

Inside the DEI journey of a Black-owned business, Uncle Nearest, which has become the fastest-growing whiskey brand in the United States.

Lots of companies are buying sophisticated software to make personalized pitches to Web site customers. Problem is, customers don’t seem to care.

Deep, lasting culture change requires an integrated approach that remodels a company’s social systems. The leadership team of Home Depot employed a remarkable set of tools to do that.

Word-of-mouth promotion has become an increasingly potent force, capable of catapulting products from obscurity into runaway commercial successes. But to harness the considerable power of buzz, companies must reject five common myths.

Companies often face new rivals, technologies, regulations, and other environmental changes that seem to come out of left field. How can they see these...

Don’t rip out the registers just yet.

J.C. Penney and its CEO Ron Johnson have parted ways. The news wasn’t terribly surprising as 2012 had been a challenging year: sales were down by $4.3B, the company lost close to $1B, and its stock price dropped by more than 50%. Despite Johnson’s and his supporters’ pleas of “give us more time,” Penney’s board […]

By instigating the dot-com crash, the capital markets have placed the entire new economy at risk.

Summertime in New England means lobster — and this year, there’s lots of it. With the abundance of lobsters in Maine this summer, prices that lobster fisherman receive at the docks have sunk to a 40 year low of under $2 a pound. (By comparison, last year dock prices reached $4 a pound.) With cheap […]

Category killers have been a disaster for brand manufacturers, right? Not necessarily. Some have figured out how to use those powerful retailers to their own advantage.

How do you stay relevant to consumers when you don't know what they want?

People love to hate packaging. And, yes, there’s a lot of bad and wasteful packaging out there. But packaging isn’t always the enemy. When it comes to protecting and dispensing food, the right package can dramatically reduce waste. In my work as a design strategist, I’ve studied the worst packaging. But I’ve also studied the […]

Women outnumber men in factory jobs in the global supply chain. Are they risking their lives or improving their livelihoods?