Marketing Tactics

Chicago-based General Growth Properties is kicking off back-to-school shopping with two promotional programs – Shop til You Rock and Family Recess.

Shop Til You Rock, a music-inspired mall tour that empowers teens to look and feel like rock stars, is back for its second year. Teens are invited to watch live performances by some of today’s hottest bands, participate in exclusive activities and take advantage of special mall offers, prizes and sweepstakes, including a chance to win valuable shopping sprees and a gaming system.

New Milford, Conn. -- Westport, Conn.-based Charter Realty & Development Corp. said it has arranged a lease for 28,000 sq. ft. for a HomeGoods store in the Kohls Plaza, located in New Milford, Conn.

HomeGoods will be a part of Litchfield Crossings, which is a new, 282,000-sq.-ft. development that is being built by Scalzo Realty.

Austin, Texas -- Whole Foods Market announced Monday it is launching a charitable organization with a goal to provide children access to healthy foods.

Whole Kids Foundation, said the grocer, will work with schools, educators and other organizations to help improve children's food choices.

The foundation's first initiative is a program to help put in place or expand teaching gardens to help build children's relationships with food through the power of gardening.

Walmart is among a group of retailers who further aligned themselves with a key Obama administration initiative this week by committing to open more than 1,500 stores in urban and rural markets defined as food deserts. The initiative is part of the Obama administration’s Let’s Move! campaign designed to address the nation’s weight problem by improving access to fresh foods.

Here are the facts:

• Walmart will open between 275 and 300 stores in food deserts by 2016.

PLANO, Texas — JCPenney announced that it is launching a new philanthropic initiative that invites customers in over 1,100 stores to turn small change into “pennies from heaven” by rounding up their purchases and donating the difference to afterschool programs. Serving as the company’s signature cause-related event, pennies from heaven will be held four times a year starting July 31 through Aug. 27 during the Back-to-School season.

NAPERVILLE, Ill. — OfficeMax announced that it will offer customers support education by carrying an extensive selection of Boise brand paper products with the Box Tops for Education seal on the package. OfficeMax retail stores and OfficeMax retail partners are currently the only office super stores to carry Boise's Box Tops for Education products, the company reported.

NEW YORK— Target, Kohl's and JCPenney ranked highest among discounters in consumer perception in the first half of 2011, according to YouGov BrandIndex. The company interviews 5,000 people each weekday from a representative U.S. population sample, more than 1.2 million interviews per year.

Here is YouGov’s Retail Buzz scores for discounters in the first half of 2011:

1.  Target (33.9) 

2. Kohl's (29.5) 

3. J.C. Penney (23.9) 

New York City -- Best Buy has launched the first campaign under the new partnership between mobile shopping application ShopSavvy and vertical ad network Longboard Media.  

The campaign features targeted and location-based feature offers, local store inventory and branding content delivered when ShopSavvy users scan relevant products with their smartphones at Best Buy locations.

J.C. Penney marketing chief Mike Boylson is trading the retail game for another type of game entirely: baseball. The 32-year J.C. Penney veteran officially left the company on July 1, and is already hard at work on his next venture: Boylson and a pal are opening a D-Bat baseball and softball training franchise in Allen, Texas, not far from J.C. Penney’s headquarters.

McKinney, Texas -- Blockbuster announced that it has assumed contracts with property owners nationwide and will maintain operations of more than 1,500 U.S. Blockbuster stores that would have closed under liquidation, as approved in a New York bankruptcy court this week. The chain also will retain more than 15,000 store employees.