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Who knows the most about a local market’s opportunities, trends, needs and other nuances? The franchisees, agents, dealers and business owners who spend all of their time there? Or the people hundreds of miles away at their company’s national headquarters or its ad agency?

Studies have shown that given a choice, most people in an unfamiliar location will make do at a chain restaurant they know rather than try a local restaurant that they have never seen before. That is the power of branding. This means that branding is essential for your SMS marketing program.

Some retailers started building CRM and clienteling solutions to blur the lines between physical stores, and online and mobile channels. While these digital technologies improve the customer experience, consumers do not think in these terms at all.

Mobile users may discover some applications on their own, but in fact, app advertising is the driving force responsible for 57 percent of new app downloads. And for app advertising to continue to attract a steady stream of loyal users, app marketers must perfect their courting skills.

This past week, the media happily announced that Echo was “all growed up.” An astounding adulthood spurt given that Echo is mainly relegated to kitchens and has the key functionality of telling you the weather and managing your Spotify account while your fingers are full of cookie dough.

Mobile marketing is a rapidly changing landscape and 2016 will see even further evolution. Last year witnessed a huge rise in all kinds of mobile advertising, including traditional mobile site ads and in-application mobile ads, and consolidation of mobile ad networks.

A recent Nielsen study shows that consumers use nearly 30 apps per month regularly. However, 60 percent of smartphone users have fewer than two shopping-specific apps, while 21 percent do not have any, according to Forrester.

There seems to be a common understanding among luxury brands that high-priced items are not going to thrive online and that using an ecommerce platform may even devalue products.

As they make their shift toward digital-centric business, luxury brands should pay attention to these emerging four major themes.

Despite the fact that consumers basically carry computers in their pockets, marketers are still counting on them to get out their scissors and Ziploc bags before heading to the store.

Quoting comedian Rodney Dangerfield, HENRYs “get no respect” in luxury circles. They are the lower-income, mass-affluents. HENRYs (High Earners Not Rich Yet) have incomes from $100,000 to $249,999, and they number nearly 24 million households, as compared with 3.3 million in the ranks of the ultra-affluents.

Applift and Forensiq estimate that 34 percent of programmatic mobile ad inventory is fraudulent.

For almost as long as mobile phones and text messaging have been around, people have been predicting the death of SMS marketing. There are, in fact, reasons to suppose that the future of SMS is more secure than many other types of marketing.

Mobile advertisers now spend an average of $9.46 for a registered user and up to $16.01 for sharing the app content. And costs will continue to skyrocket.

This year will see the realization of new retail formats that harness emerging trends at their best, and luxury brands will need to decide how they will work with these new formats.

To industry pundits and casual observers, it came as a shock this week when Apple projected that growth for its iPhone sales would hit the slowest pace since 2007, the year of the iconic phone’s release.

With live-streaming of fashion shows the norm, the buzz that a brand can create is little more than the 12 minutes of its duration, and then we are all onto the next event.

Since digital media platforms have come into existence, sports brands have used them as mechanisms to shout to their audience. This has resulted in a megaphone for teams and leagues to tell their stories. The conversation has essentially been a one-way experience where teams would hope that fans would find them.

Your effectiveness as a marketer or retailer of true luxury products or services could be substantially influenced by your answer to this question.

Last year was another banner year for mobile. Mobile search overtook desktop for the first time, heralding the smartphone as the connected digital device of choice. We also saw further market penetration for new mobile platforms such as wearables and mobile pay.

China has declared a national holiday this year from Feb. 7-13, which paves the way for the massive travel that corresponds to Chinese New Year, known as the 40-day Chunyun period. This is also the largest human migration in the world, with more than 3.7 billion trips made during the Chunyun period in 2015.