Stores Magazine - December 2007 - (Page 14)

trEnDS COMPILED BY STORES EDITORS Laundry Trumps Holiday Shopping? A new Yahoo! Poll conducted by Harris Interactive finds that many consumers would rather engage in a variety of mundane chores than venture out to the local mall to do holiday shopping. According to the survey, about a third of online adults (34 percent) would rather do laundry than go shopping in a mall during the holiday season. Among women, 37 percent prefer writing holiday cards to tackling holiday crowds at stores. Men are especially mall-averse; 18 percent say they would rather do their taxes, 33 percent would rather wash their cars and 25 percent would rather shovel snow. On the bright side, consumers see the Internet as essential to taking some of the pain out of holiday shopping. The survey finds that 66 percent of holiday shoppers plan to use online resources before making online or offline gift purchases. Among these holiday cyber-shoppers, 75 percent say that heading online to research products and services is the first stop in their holiday shopping experience and 90 percent agree they have a better overall shopping experience when they research products online prior to shopping in-store. The survey found that 86 percent of holiday cyber-shoppers feel better about giving a gift when they’ve researched it online prior to purchase. The data also finds that more than half of online holiday shoppers (57 percent) plan to purchase at least a portion of their holiday gifts online this year. P&G’s New Spin In a marketing experiment that will no doubt wrinkle a few brows – and, perhaps, noses — Procter & Gamble is urging students at Ohio State University to NOT wash their clothes. In fact, the Cincinnati-based CPG company has gone so far as to create a new sub-brand called Swash, a pop-up store on the Ohio State campus and micro site. P&G is telling college students, a group that can easily be labeled laundry slackers, that it’s O.K. to rewear their clothes between washes and encouraging them to buy a series of Swash products that will help make the T-shirts, jeans and hoodies look and smell as if they’ve just been washed. The Swash products bear a striking resemblance to other items in the P&G stable of offerings, but they’ve been given new packing and graphics in an effort to connect with “the great unwashed masses” at one of the nation’s largest universities. The Swash pop-up store and the micro site, SwashItOut.com, sell five products ranging in price from $3 14 STORES / DECEMBER 2007 to $6. These include a clothes dewrinkler, a scented lint roller, a stain remover pen, a 10-minute clothing tumbler sheet and a spray freshener. The stain pen looks a whole lot like the Tide stain removal pen; the clothing tumbler sheets are a repurposed version of the Dryel home dry cleaning sheets; and the spray takes its cue from Febreeze. The Swash sub-brand will likely resonate with the student who will do just about anything to avoid doing laundry. But by touting the reuse of unwashed clothes as “the effortless way to save water,” it’s also connecting with an ever-expanding group of consumers. WWW.STORES.ORG http://Swashitout.com http://WWW.STORES.ORG

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Stores Magazine - December 2007

STORES - December 2007 Contents Executive Editor's Page President's Page Holiday Shopping Extravagance What Shoppers Think 10 Things You May Have Missed Numbers Worth Counting Full Price/Markdown Retail People Niche Marketing Eight Predictions for 2008 Concept2Watch Merchandising Strategy Sourcing E-Commerce Supply Chain Warehouse Management Software Contactless Payments Marketing Marketing Online Loeb Retail Letter ARTS Update Point of View NRF News Retail Industry Calendar Last Laugh

Stores Magazine - December 2007

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