If you are going to sell T-shirts at $60 price points, you'd better think differently about casual apparel and even retail experiences. The D2C apparel brand Goodlife has a handful of physical retail outlets that it is leveraging as omnichannel customer acquisition tools rather than profit centers. And by putting LTV as a core metric, the marketing approach is taking pages from some unlikely product categories like CPGs. $60 T-Shirts as CPGs? Yup.

In the recent Virginia Governor's race the Youngkin and McAuliffe campaigns had very different branding challenges that will be familiar to consumer marketers generally. Youngkin was an upstart challenger who needed to build a brand narrative before the competition came back hard and negative. McAuliffe was a legacy brand that needed to remind political customers what they once liked about him and his policies. Principals from both campaigns joined us recently to compare their strategies and tactics, quiz one another and perhaps foreshadow the marketing challenges for Rs and Ds in this cycle.

The founder of fresh and healthy dog food brand Get Joy comes to his fixation on virtual community and collaboration honestly. It is in his pedigree. Tom Arrix helped build Facebook's ad business, as one of the earliest employees at the company in 2006 and eventually leader of the North American ad business. And so his vision for poking through the D2C dog food clutter involves retail, content, media and social models that attempt to appreciate how people live, online and off, and how their pets are woven into family life. It's a slow burn and a long game, he …

If you want to know how well a business is doing, just stand by the cash register. That is American Express's unique perch amid the post-pandemic recovery. Its ongoing Global Business Spend Indicator shows considerable growth trajectories. R.J. Ancona, VP/GM, B2B, Global Merchant & Network Services, tells us this week that the recent COVID reprise has done little to dampen a general optimism among the business sector about 2022. Still, being better prepared for the unexpected has become engrained in everyone's planning process. And so the business term of 2022 seems already to have been born. If "pivot" and "empathy" …