2011 Trends Part 2

2. Discount Retail - the high fashion kind

Recently, stores like hautelook.com and ideeli.com have cropped up allowing regular joes access to fashions usually found at Barney's and Neiman Marcus. These online shops carry entirely different merchandise than what you would find in a TJ Maxx or Ross type discount outlets.

Their process is to require all users to sign-up to gain access to the sales. Additionally, most of the items are "limited time only" so the preview emails and announcements of when items go on sale are key to beat the your friends to the good deals.

The economy has been difficult lately so I can see how these retailers would have been affected by the downturn. Their items are a serious discount from their original price, but still not in the price range that would appeal to a wide selection of buyers. Personally, I feel like all the items are things I would still need to save up for, but with the limited availability I'm torn.

On the other hand, these stores really know their marketing. Not only do they get all their customer's info in order to have them view the merchandise, but they have nailed the scarcity concept and keeping their public waiting. Their biggest asset is that with the limited time for sales, consumers buy items very quickly. I like to place items in my cart and re-visit them until I've made a decision, but there is no way to do that with these sites. They also have a daily record of what items sell the best so they know which items are more valuable. Other stores have to carry alot of pesky inventory and wait weeks to know what people like. This quick turnover model allows them to know same day what was a popular item. Being a fashion buyer just got easier.

2011 Marketing Trends- Number 1

Recently, iMedia Connection published an article on-line titled, The Companies that will rule 2011. You can find the article here. This has inspired me to make my own list of 2011 Marketing Trends.

1) Social Media, but not what you're thinking...

While Facebook and Twitter are kings in the social media domain, I think blogging is going to become more of a trend in the next year. In the past year, blogs were pivotal in breaking news. For example, when Michael Jackson died, I remember going to TMZ.com to check that it was true. Another example is when Gizmodo broke the story about the iPhone 4. Plus there are sites like Wikileaks where the whole premise is leaking government secrets.

Right now, the difficulty with blogging is it's fragmentation. Blog's like PerezHilton.com receive millions od daily visitors; Hilton's one day record is 13.9 million page views. Additionally, The Huffington Post receives 28,000,000 unique visitors a month. It is, by some accounts, the world's most popular blog. Then there are small blogs like this one that are more niche.

The key to their growth is that most blogs are now posting fragments of their articles on Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic to their websites. These channels plus RSS feeds are helping to decrease the fragmentation and allow readers to get all their content in one place. Now news will spread even faster.

For more info on blogs, check out Time's list of the 25 Best Blogs of 2009 here.

What are your thoughts?