Here’s a spread from the Target Home catalog (online here). We received it in the mail last week.

We are Target watchers, and always marvel at the retailer’s moves to upmarket tastes. This catalog could have easily been from any number of upscale, lifestyle retailers. It spoke volumes about Targets strategy and the confusing state of brands and retail in America.

Target competes for attention with dozens of catalogs that find their way into our home each month. And, they  understand that this environment demands sophisticated storytelling. On this front they stand up well against the savvy merchants like Anthropolgie, Crate and Barrel, Williams Sonoma etc.

Witness how its taking shape online. Features like the Red Hot Shop, Best Friends Forever, UP2D8 are setting the standard for front end experiences to mass retail.

Here’s a brand whose appeal is very different…. its strength is the ability to go high and low. It’s that tension that makes it attractive in many ways. Its populist but always with tongue in cheek. Its aspirational for some, a guilty pleasure for others but always a low cost shortcut to desires fulfilled.

Target is replacing the middle class department store we grew up with.  Many of the name brands are the same  (any doubt, look at the summer catalog).  They’ve traded  expensive real estate and instore  merchandising for clean brightly lit warehouses mixing packaged goods with tableware, video games and fashion.

In a sense, catalog and web merchandising (which Target has become incredibly good at) tells the story,  fuels the dream. The store, an efficient and clean, supplies the ingredients to make it real. The consumer gets luxury and value.

Expectations of mass luxury and the cost pressures to get their will push many retailers to streamline the physical and invest in the virtual. They will have to become better story tellers and content producers in the process.

It’s happening in retail.. and causing what I beleive is a renaissance in automotive marketing. Much of  the work is rich, multifaceted and full of ideas.

This is why our industry is so exiting right now.

Troy