Mobile Marketing

The holidays are becoming an increasingly social event, as evidenced by the promotional campaigns of two major department store chains this season.

According to Adweek, both Target and Macy’s are heavily leveraging a variety of social media platforms to engage consumers for the 2015 holiday season. Target has increased the percentage of its overall paid media spend represented by social to 12%, up 30% from about 9% in 2014.

Specialty apparel retailer New York & Company is targeting social media-savvy young women with a new promotional campaign that brings jeans into the digital realm.

New York & Company is promoting its new line of Soho jeans with a rich media campaign featuring American Idol alum Jennifer Hudson. Through the trends section of its main e-commerce site (avoiding any content silos), New York & Company displays images of Hudson that can bring the customer directly to a product page for purchase.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday may still be cool, after all.

A new study on the holiday shopping habits of almost 7,000 millennials by product discovery platform Influenster shows that 93% of respondents plan on shopping Black Friday and/or Cyber Monday this year.

More than half of all shoppers are planning to make holiday purchases over the Thanksgiving holiday period, according to a new report.

The 2015 International Council of Shopping Centers Black Friday Shopping Study shows that 59% of shoppers plan to make a purchase at a physical store over the weekend (Thursday-Sunday).

Surprisingly, Cyber Monday is shaping up to be the second-most popular day for in-store shopping – even though it’s a day normally associated with online activity. Overall, Americans plan to shop in-store on:

Shoppers have wasted no time in getting started with their holiday purchases this year, according to a new survey.

The National Retail Federation’s Consumer Holiday Spending Survey shows that 56.6% of those celebrating the holidays had already started shopping by early November, up from 54.4% last year and 16% from the 49% who had started by this time in 2008, the first time NRF asked the question. This also marks the highest percentage seen in that timeframe.

Walmart’s Thanksgiving weekend promotional strategy is taking a more digital, less promotional turn that may hurt sales but should lessen the scenes of customer chaos and conflict that find their way onto YouTube.

Personalized shopping app ShopAdvisor and Elle magazine are turning readers into brick-and-mortar shoppers.

Elle and ShopAdvisor have released results of the August 2015 “Shop Now With Elle” proximity mobile marketing program. The program connected consumers to retailers and provided them with exclusive content and offers using location-based mobile technology, including beacons and geo-fences.

Taubman Centers is expanding its use of a mobile app that lets retail tenants connect with shoppers once they sign into a center’s WiFi network and offer them store-specific deals.