No one wants to be forced to do something. Whether it’s the newest “best practice” or the “old standard,” people and companies want to be able to choose the path for themselves. At VMWare, the company that offers their tech stacks and service to many of the big companies, the idea of choice is taken to another level.

For VMWare’s CIO, Jason Conyard, it means recognizing a shift in the world around companies and enabling them to choose what they run, where they run it and how they run it.

“VMware is kind of like Switzerland in that regard,’’ he…

When Steph So joined the team at Shake Shack in 2019, she was excited for the opportunity to grow the digital side of the famous burger company from a point where it was accounting for 20 percent of the business to possibly 25 or even 30 percent. So when COVID hit and all of a sudden digital accounted for 80 percent of sales, you’d think that Steph would feel like she bit off more of that burger than she could chew.

Not so, because as Steph says, digital can scale, and Shake Shack was able to handle the new higher…

Let’s be frank: what your brand says and what it actually does are sometimes two very different things. With consumer expectations rising, they are now checking their receipts and making sure that the rhetoric stemming from a brand actually matches its actions.

“Consumers more than ever before, and customers more than ever before, look to make sure that what our brand is saying is what is delivered through every interaction and every touch point that they have in their experience. It’s a promise, made promise mindset. …

The relationship between a brand and an influencer is a two-way street. Just like the relationship between an influencer or a brand and their audience is also a give and take. But even though that sounds obvious, even the most successful brands and influencers are struggling to get the most out of their content.

Tessa Barton, AKA Tezza, has experiences on both sides of that spectrum. She is an influencer-turned-entrepreneur, whose company — also called Tezza — has seen its ups and downs in the five years she’s been working on it.

Before starting her own company, Barton says that…

Consumers are different today than they were last year or even last week. Tastes constantly change, and if there is one thing marketers are frequently reminded of, it’s that there is no secret recipe to understand consumer trends in the marketplace. All you can do is look at the data, and what it says these days is that consumers are more focused on a brand’s values than they ever have been before. They want to see transparency and have trust in the brands they buy from. …

Traditional retailers are facing an onslaught of competition from ecommerce the likes of which wasn’t expected to be seen for years. But because of the acceleration of online shopping in the last 18 months, brick and mortar stores are in scramble mode to catch up or be kicked to the curb.

Helping retailers take charge of their digital transformation journeys and get in on all of the online action is Sensormatic, which serves retailers with IoT technology to help them with things like inventory intelligence and accuracy, gathering shopper insights, converting foot traffic, and more. …

In a company that has been working and succeeding for more than a century, change doesn’t always seem necessary. And even for newer brands, when you find a winning formula, when you have revenue coming in, and when consumers have grown to trust you, why even bother to do anything differently?

Survival and the ability to thrive in the business world does, however, always depend on the ability to evolve, especially if you are a big business with big competition. UPS had done an amazing job for 100 years building the company into a wild success. …

We talk about brands a lot on Marketing Trends. From the relationship consumers have with their favorite companies, to the marketing strategies behind what makes them thrive. But while we spend all this time talking about brands, we don’t often talk about parent companies or the challenges they face when marketing a portfolio of multiple brands, each of which serves a very different demographic. Casper’s Ice Cream is one of those companies. Casper’s has outgrown the safety net of its beloved FatBoy ice cream sandwiches and now oversees three very distinct brands and products. …