Sales & Marketing

As senior editor of Chain Store Age it is my pleasure to welcome you to the first edition of our new Customer Disruption e-newsletter. Every other Thursday, I will be presenting you with content from the Chain Store Age website and magazine highlighting how retailers are using technology to provide customers with the type of seamless, personalized shopping experience they have come to expect.

Chattanooga, Tenn. -- To increase control of its digital activities, SmartFurniture.com chose to implement a stable of proprietary and third-party analytics, campaign management, and optimization tools. However, the solutions lacked the functionality and flexibility necessary to capture, analyze, and transform data into actionable insights, so SmartFurniture.com expanded adoption of Adobe Marketing Cloud.

The Michigan Retailers Association (MRA) said that Michigan's retail industry had a poor holiday shopping season thanks to damaging winter storms and “outdated government policies that favor out-of-state online companies.”

Retailers posted only a 0.1% average increase over last holiday season, according to the Michigan Retail Index, a joint project of MRA and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

New York – Eighty percent of U.S. consumers use the Internet when they shop. And the fourth annual research study of shopper behavior by Cisco Consulting Services revealed the percentage of “Über-Digitals” shoppers, who regularly use their smartphones for their shopping decision-making, nearly doubled to 18% of the sampled population.

Campbell Soup Company has named SVP of finance Anthony P. DiSilvestro as SVP and CFO, effective May 1. He succeeds B. Craig Owens, CFO and chief administrative officer since 2008, who plans to retire on that date.

Columbia, S.C. — EDENS has announced that four new local retailers and restaurants will open at Park Road Shopping Center in Charlotte, N.C., in the coming months.

The newly announced additions include:

• Cantina 1511, a Mexican eatery, plans to open toward the end of this summer.

• Va Da Vie is a local gelato store scheduled to open in February.

• LALA Girl, a locally owned beauty service makeup bar, plans to open this spring.

The Home Depot has acquired Blinds.com, the Houston-based online window coverings retailer.

In explaining the appeal of the partnership, Home Depot cited Blinds.com's integrated user experience, on-demand staff and knowledge base.

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