As the pop-up landscape matures, consumer fatigue and market saturation with “immersive,” Instagrammable destinations force retailers to explore how having a pop-up store ladders up to their brand and business. Successful pop-ups today are not a sole PR play and/or a sales and distribution channel. They succeed because their role...

Across fashion and beauty, both established and emerging brands are serious about investing in content. The challenge is that they don’t always know where to start or how to set up streamlined content operations. The outcome is that content is outsourced to publishers’ content studios and/or agencies. This is a missed...

A company cannot innovate if its suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and packaging partners are lagging behind. CMOs often do not have the authority to innovate, at least not in reality, as their roles do not encompass the entire value chain. But innovation is a growth engine, not a project -- and...

Bag review videos, unboxing videos and live-streaming shopping videos are all the rage, especially in Asia. They are instructional and homemade, and they clock enviable viewership and engagement, often considerably surpassing that of professionally produced videos featured on luxury fashion brands’ official channels. 

The best brand experiences today are not about brands, but about life. Life doesn’t distinguish between categories. Consumers increasingly expect experiences that are holistic, seamlessly integrating different aspects of their lives. This emerging, strategic territory provides three lessons for hospitality brands.

To be successful, a consistent and sustainable content strategy needs to be an organizational mandate, and a brand and business priority. A smart content strategy provides the glue between the brand’s various activities, and acts as an often-missing link between brand and performance marketing. To improve their content game, luxury...

It’s time to change the hair-care industry. Beauty’s least innovative category, hair care has until recently operated business as usual, with salons and retailers as the key gateways for consumers. While this may still be the case, hair care is slowly starting to experiment with new the business models and...

The current dominant modes of enforcing transparency in fashion -- through green capsule collections, sustainability pledges and raw material traceability via blockchain -- are all focused on cleaning up fashion production, but that's not enough to create real change.

In today’s beauty industry, success is more unpredictable than ever. This is because much of it is the result of social influence: the effect people have on one another’s decisions. Today, this effect is massive; thanks to Instagram and YouTube and Snapchat and Pinterest, we are constantly exposed to one...