Pi-Consulting

Sam’s Club, the warehousing sales arm of Wal-Mart, has being busy discovering a new kind of member. Founded with the original idea of being the outlet of choice for small businesses, the Club began to find itself bumping up against intrinsic limits to the buying power of its core constituency. Whoops, what happened to all that growth? Wait a minute. Who else likes saving money on bulk purchases of boring stuff like dishwasher tablets and toilet rolls? Why… moms, dummy! And guess what? They represent kind of, like, 80% of all regular shoppers! Wow! Why not get moms to be members? History has yet to relate if non-business users will be the saving of Sam’s Club, and how the original small business membership will feel about it if they are. Sources: Wall Street Journal Online, WARC Bulletin, Pi.

Just as High Fashion decides it reigns supreme, something happens to disrupt the hegemony of the proprietary designer label. The battlements of America’s fashion retail business are being stormed by… retailers’ Own Label goods, of all unlikely new entrants.

Those who thought that Designer Label giants would rule the mall for a thousand years are blinking in disbelief at an upstart source of sales which was always supposed to be constrained to the point of insignificance by its relentless dowdiness. Top names like Liz Claiborne are staring into the abyss of precipitous sales fall-offs, while retailer JC Penney laughs all the way to the bank with the takings from its own labels such as Worthington, a.n.a, and Arizona. These “names from nowhere” already represent half of Penney’s clothing sales. Macy’s have turned over significant retail space to their own labels such as American Rag and Alfani. Far from being confined to the USA, similar trends are also overturning top brands’ presumption of supremacy in London stores like Harrods and Selfridges. (more…)

After decades of believing that “you can never be too rich or too thin”, women are at last challenging the second half of that precept. And marketers are supporting them in turning their backs on the waif-like physical ideal that fashion and the movie industry have demanded of the female form since the 1920s. Bosses at Anglo-Dutch consumer goods conglomerate Unilever have announced their corporate determination to celebrate a more generously-proportioned body shape. This year the firm issued an edict to its marketers that the only models to be used in advertising its products would be those with a healthy Body Mass Index, calculated as the proportion of body fat to other tissue. Unilever is already boosting the self-esteem of bigger girls with its “Real Beauty” campaign for Dove soap and personal care products, whose sales seem to have benefited from spontaneous uplift even when their models didn’t. Sources: WARC Bulletin, Pi.