Topping the list is the movie "Up In The Air," featuring George Clooney as a career business traveler whose goal is to achieve 10 million frequent-flier miles on American Airlines while staying at various Hilton hotels, Andrew Hampp reports. The marketers didn't pay a single dime for the exposure -- valued at $14.5 million -- but ran extensive marketing campaigns of their own around the flick.

Brian Sweeney, a 42-year-old sales and marketing executive at General Motors who became general manager of Buick-GMC on Dec. 17, says his greatest challenge will be to attract a younger clientele -- by which he means whippersnappers in their 40s and 50s, to the Buick brand. GMC is doing fine, he says. While the average age of a U.S. car buyer is 52, the average age of a buyer of a Buick sedan is 70, Craig Bierley, Buick's product marketing director, tells Chrissie Thompson. But progress is being made -- more than a third of the new 2010 …

Macy's is getting the message that it's not what the retailer wants to sell but rather what the customer wants to buy, Laura Baverman reports. It is halfway through its second year of MyMacy's, a strategy to tailor the merchandise and customer experience to the communities in which each store operates. Previously, it categorized its stores by size and type, and buyers in New York sent each store within a category the same set of merchandise. Sales are down for the first 10 months of Macy's 2009 fiscal year following a two-year slump. But analysts expect localization to …

There's further good news for retailers and e-tailers alike in Lee Eisenberg's new book, Shoptimism (Free Press, $26). In fact, the former editor-in-chief of Esquire and past evp at Lands' End, posits, "our economy, our culture, and our social order are built around the Buy. For better and worse, America is, on balance, what it buys." Americans have four good reasons for buying products (that don't put them into debt), Eisenberg writes and Kerry Hannon reports: Products make them happy (e.g., ticket to a play or a trip to Paris); they transform them (e.g., a new hairdo); self-extension …

Retailers and malls that have been in survival mode for the past two years now need to reposition themselves to reach consumers who have new demands and ways of shopping, Bain & Co. partner Michael Collins tells Ann Zimmerman and Rachel Dodes. Many are too big, for one thing, now that many shoppers are doing their browsing online. And chain retailers have to make their products more enticing, as Best Buy is doing, by allowing consumers to plays with gadgets at the middle of their stores. That said, things are looking up. "The rise in wages …

Before we examine larger retailing trends and take a look at what stores of the future might be offering, let's get down to the brass tack of the just-concluded holiday shopping season. The verdict is that retailers got a "modest gift" -- a 3.6% sales increase over last year Nov. 1 to Dec. 24, according to SpendingPulse, an information service of MasterCard Advisors. Online spending, meanwhile, leaped 15.5%. Analysts caution that last year was so bad that sales had almost nowhere to go but up. "We're still shy of the levels we saw from a couple years ago," says …