retail-marketing
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The Tiny Audience That Made The Yaffe Group Think Bigger
A Detroit-area agency discovered that the smaller the target, the less room there was for lazy thinking. Its answer was Humanalytics - data with a pulse.
Avalon Communications and the art of making a bike lock interesting
A burrito-sized bike lock, bedtime products for dogs, and a better way to open a can. Avalon Communications’ public work shows how a useful product detail becomes a story someone might actually read.
ScaleCreative and the case of the missing three weeks
A pet retailer needed four weeks to get campaign creative out the door. ScaleCreative says it brought that down to one. The interesting part is what happened between the brief and the finished ad.
Dengage wants your customer data to earn its keep
The London company connects customer data to the messages people actually receive. Its retail and banking customers show why the useful work begins long before anyone presses send.
Carolyn Pollock Is Teaching a 112-Year-Old Sports Brand to Listen
The genetics graduate who helped modernize Men’s Wearhouse now has a new experiment: turn Wilson’s century of sporting memory into stronger, more human connections with athletes everywhere.
Chris Miller Knows the Retail Strategy Hiding in Plain Sight
The Burlington marketing executive began with opera, learned strategy at Bain, and now helps a $10.6 billion off-price retailer make a provocative bet: the store itself is still the product.
Christina Lipinski Is Marketing a Feeling You Can’t Add to Cart
Her résumé runs from Saatchi to Southern style. At Billy Reid, Christina Lipinski’s most revealing campaign may be a three-day Alabama gathering where the conversion metric begins with people simply feeling the brand.
Craig Brommers Writes the Marketing Plan - Then Leaves Room for the Plot Twist
At American Eagle, the veteran retail marketer treats culture like a live signal, keeps part of the budget ready for surprise, and measures the commotion at the cash register.
Bobby Ferrario’s Retail Playbook: Curiosity, Empathy, and the Customer in the Room
At Talbots, Bobby Ferrario is pairing a heritage red door with a digital-first brief. His route there - from Gap and bebe to New York & Company and Orchard Brands - reveals a practical philosophy: protect the relationship, then modernize the experience.
Adam Lebowitz Is Selling Stretch Jeans Everywhere - Even on a Ski Lift
Mugsy's CMO came up through sports media, then traded brand partnerships for the daily arithmetic of DTC. His playbook is unusually public: test more, protect the second purchase, own the mistakes - and keep pitching when the office happens to be a chairlift.
Christie Raymond Made the Department Store Listen
An industrial engineer turned retail marketer, Christie Raymond built her career by treating attention as data and loyalty as a promise. Her final chapter at Kohl's reveals what modern brand leadership looks like when the spreadsheet and the shopping cart have to agree.
Brett O'Brien Is Putting Foot Locker Back in the Cultural Conversation
After 25 years turning drinks and snacks into sports rituals, Brett O'Brien has a new assignment: make a familiar sneaker retailer mean something again.
Carly Gomez Is Teaching a Foam Clog to Tell Stories
Crocs' chief marketing officer built her career from the shop floor up. Now she is turning charms, creators and tiny serialized dramas into a practical lesson in how brands earn attention.
Alix Coucardon Learned to Market Without Silos
After 14 years in consumer brands, Alix Coucardon arrived at Adore Me with a full marketing playbook. Four years later, her sharper lesson is that customers never see the org chart.
Santiago Blanco Is Marketing McDonald's for the Age of Infinite Choice
After a career spanning Coca-Cola, higher education and restaurant brands, Santiago Blanco has settled on a demanding idea: attention is earned by joining the experience, not interrupting it.
Angela MacInnis Has Spent a Career Making Complicated Things Feel Simple
From youth marketing at DDB to a national retail reset at Best Buy Canada and a new chapter at KITS, Angela MacInnis has built her career around one deceptively hard brief: make the customer experience easier to understand and better to use.
Mary MacIsaac Moves at the Speed of the Shopping Cart
Inside Loblaw's marketing machine, Mary MacIsaac turns cupboard curiosity, live customer signals and local store voices into brands built for everyday Canadian life.
Troy Yung Has Spent 30 Years Following the Shopper to the Shelf
From Kraft Foods to 6Degrees and now Godin Productions, Troy Yung’s career traces a practical argument: marketing gets interesting where strategy meets the physical world.
Ashish Khera’s Retail Playbook: Let the Store Do the Talking
At Healthy Planet, Ashish Khera is treating each new store as a local experiment - one where format, education and trust matter as much as the marketing campaign.
Marc MacRae Built a Retail Career Like a Coach Builds a Team
Across four decades in sporting-goods retail, Marc MacRae has treated merchandising, mentoring and football coaching as versions of the same job: put people in the right position, then help them win.
Cindy-Lynn Steele Knows the Store Is a System
From software engineering to Grocery Gateway, Giant Tiger and fractional leadership, Cindy-Lynn Steele has spent more than 25 years treating marketing as an operating system - one that must connect the customer, the store and the numbers.
Nicolas Gaudreau Has Spent a Career Turning Digital Disruption Into a Working System
From Bell and Yellow Pages to fashion, outdoor retail and CAA-Québec, Nicolas Gaudreau’s career offers a practical lesson in transformation: make the strategy clear, build the team around it, and turn disruption into something customers can actually use.
Chris Bosworth Markets the Outdoors From Inside the Story
Before Chris Bosworth marketed canoe trips, cycling routes and Muskoka weekends, he learned the terrain from a store at Opeongo - then paddled 420 kilometres around it.
Tammy Sadinsky’s Playbook for Making Heritage Brands Feel Useful Again
After three decades across cereal aisles, coffee counters, checkout lanes, banking apps and classrooms, Tammy Sadinsky keeps returning to one practical question: what does this brand make easier for people right now?
Donna Finelli and the Local Advantage
After building brands Canadians encounter every day, Donna Finelli took on a harder brief: make a national sporting-goods network feel unmistakably local. Her answer begins with the people who sharpen the skates, fit the gear and know the town.
Stephen Bailey Built a Marketing Career Around Shoes That Refuse to Blend In
For more than two decades at John Fluevog Shoes, Stephen Bailey has treated marketing less like a megaphone and more like a meeting place - one where customers sketch shoes, staff build trust, and weirdness is useful business discipline.
Katherine Kalen’s Marketing Has Always Had a Floor Plan
From Sears analyst to SUNPAN chief marketing officer, Katherine Kalen has spent her career turning furniture marketing into something people can enter, use and remember.
Godin Productions Bet the Shop on Making the Stuff It Used to Broker
For three decades, Godin Productions coordinated the messy work behind retail displays. Then a pandemic-era decision to manufacture in-house changed its margins, its machinery and the size of the problems it could take on.
Jen Porter Built a Retail Career Across Every Place a Customer Can Look
From the merchant floor to a billion-dollar furniture brand, Porter learned to treat catalogs, screens and showrooms as one conversation. Her Arhaus chapter ended in July 2026, but the operating lesson is still useful: the channel is never the whole customer journey.
Erin Condon Goes One Click Deeper
CVS Pharmacy’s marketing chief built her career where numbers meet judgment. Her operating rule is simple: listen closely, move quickly, and reserve a little room for the big swing.