Smart retailers are diving headfirst into “experiential retail”—creating a sensory and cultural experience for customers. From Nike’s pop-up Re-Creation Center to Starbucks’ Reserve Roastery, these experiential retail campaigns have one thing in common: they’re vying for customers’ time, not just their money. Instead of just selling sneakers, Nike is inviting customers to learn together. Instead of just selling coffee, Starbucks is creating an immersive experience featuring small-batch blends and boutique roasting methods. These brands have noticed that modern consumers crave meaningful experiences, and they’re responding with visual merchandising, brand events, and delightful pop-up shops.

You might be surprised by how much the design of your office affects your employees’ productivity. Want to make the most of a corporate office? Make sure you have a good balance of collaborative space and isolated, quiet areas for complex tasks. Make your reception space a focal point and a flawless first impression. Incorporate plants and natural elements, which have been proven to increase productivity. Equip workstations with sit-stand desks to attract healthy employees (and care for the wellbeing of existing ones). Read the full article for more great ideas!

It’s time to spread the word about your next trade show—and if you’re a small business, that prospect is intimidating. But nowadays, you don’t need a massive budget to be a trade show rockstar. Really! A small business can increase exposure by encouraging staff to make personalized contact. Consider running “swag” contests on social media to hype up your presence among locals. Bring that swag to the show, too: Even as a small business, you can appear just as competent as bigger brands with trained staff, attractive promotions, and a fully decked-out display.

Fully digital direct-to-consumer (D2C) merchandising has, apparently, seen its heyday. Although it seems like only a scant few years have passed since D2C brands began to subvert the traditional retail sector, the trend is already reversing. Digitally native brands such as Warby Parker have been opening more stores, and many are partnering with larger brick-and-mortar retailers (see Casper and West Elm). They’re doing this because they’ve grown—and the digital-only D2C business model imposes a growth ceiling, partly because of the high customer acquisition cost (CAC). Brands have no choice: if they want to continue scaling up, they’ll need brick-and-mortar retailing. We’re eager to see how D2C companies will handle the challenge of bringing their digital branding into the physical world.

Chicago Business has released this year’s list of the city’s 12 coolest offices, and the pictures are worth a look. For example, the sports marketing firm Fulton Market makes an unforgettable impression by displaying Emerson Fittipaldi's IndyCar race car right at the entrance. The office of Tom Stringer Design Partners, in contrast, barely looks like an office at all, evoking the ambiance of a penthouse home. Finally, the acoustics experts at Turf deliberately chose a space with an overbearing echo to demonstrate the effectiveness of their technology in the face of a real challenge. Check out the photo gallery at the button below.

If you neglect your trade show branding strategy, you’re wasting the money you’re spending to attend in the first place. That’s because your brand won’t stand out at the show. Fortunately, the Trade Show News Network has boiled trade show branding down to four crucial components: booth design, brand experience, brand ambassadors, and social compatibility. By putting adequate planning and resources into each of these, you can take charge of attendees’ experience of your brand from the moment they first encounter your booth. In doing this, it’s vital to see your booth as a brand experience—and an opportunity to make social connections—rather than a 3D catalog of your product offerings.

Banks’ marketing teams are right to see Millennials as a market segment worth capturing—many haven’t committed to one bank, and their loyalty is up for grabs. However, it’s possible that marketers have erroneously pigeonholed all Millennials into a single group based on their age. The fact is that some Millennials are now starting to act like Gen X-ers, seeking help with college funds, investments, IRAs, and mortgages. The best pre-qualified prospects are going to come from this subset of the Millennial population. So, it might make more sense to segment Millennials based on their different lifestyles, and stop targeting campaigns exclusively toward the beer-drinking hipsters of the bunch.