Here are three brands that exemplify the new model:

Trulia: At the simple level, Trulia is a real estate site.  Take a look at some recent business moves and the overall user experience and it has incorporated much more. You can buy, sell, or rent real estate. However, Trulia has taken the model further into mobile, location marketing, lifestyle content and even BtoB communications. On its mobile site, Trulia introduced a new app last month that makes it easier to get the inside scoop on crime rates and local amenities such as restaurants, banks, and grocery stores. It also enables 3D Android maps. It has focused on user experience and in doing so, expanded its brand footprint. Trulia is positioning itself as the leading brand to capitalize on the housing recovery.

Cafepress: The basics: Custom T-shirts. Now it bills itself as the “world’s customization engine.” On May 14 it took its business of putting customized messaging on everything from T-shirts to pillows into the small business area. PressIt, is an e-commerce plug-in that creates opportunities for bloggers and other small online businesses to monetize their original content. without relying solely on outside advertising placements that may detract from a site’s unique focus. PressIt is a free, downloadable button that can be added to any Web page. It synchronizes a site’s proprietary Web content with the CafePress product ecosystem, enabling bloggers and other small online businesses to generate revenue from a blog’s original content by allowing visitors to create fully customizable print-on-demand products through CafePress.

“PressIt is a logical extension of our brand strategy — the intersection of customization and technology,” said CafePress CEO Bob Marino. “It’s a simple yet powerful tool that broadens access to our platform and allows anyone with original content — bloggers, artists, photographers — to engage with their audiences in a new way.”

Ditto: One of the “25 E-Commerce Brands To Watch” as named by Brand Innovators, Ditto has taken the e-commerce business model onto mobile devices in an innovative way. In February the online eyewear retailer announced the launch of its free iPad app, which incorporates its 3D video try-on technology into a mobile experience. It puts the selection online and the fit online.  Shoppers use a webcam to record a video of their face turning from side to side. That video is then used to let shoppers virtually try on glasses that are sized properly on their face. By comparing styles side-by-side on the app, users can choose your own or get style advice from friends before purchasing. According to the company, the technology is so effective that Ditto has a six percent return rate — twenty percent lower than the industry standard.

More business model twists and turns are launched every day. But not all of them increase the user experience and brand affinity as much as these three.

As Timex Senior Brand Manager, Sports at Timex, that’s where Martin finds himself and his product line at one of the world’s oldest and most iconic American brands. Prior to Timex, he was a Brand Manager at Sun Products Corporation. One of his first initiatives when he started at the brand last fall was to find out exactly what the opportunity was for Timex, as well as his competitors in the world of high-end timekeeping for athletes. Those competitors: Garmin, Nike, Adidas and many other smaller high-end companies. The opportunity: 54 percent of all the athletes Timex surveyed did not wear a watch when they worked out or competed in a race.

“The brand had a very strong perception among runners,” Martin says. “It is a strong lifestyle brand and very well connected to the Ironman challenge. We knew with the market opportunity so wide open that this was a matter of getting watches on wrists. We knew we had many products that could fit the bill from $20 to $300. We needed to connect with the athlete that would decide he or she needed a watch to train. We wanted to position a watch to be just as essential as the shoes.”

Martin and his team knew they needed to connect with serious athletes and it set out on an ambitious campaign to do it. The Boston Marathon of 2013 will remembered for things other than running. However, Timex effectively used the event as an anchor for launch of “I Am A Runner.” The goal was to tell the brand story by connecting with runner’s stories. It kicked off with a series of media activities in New York City featuring Boston Marathon legend, Dick Hoyt . Hoyt, a longtime Timex ambassador, has competed in more than 1,000 endurance events along with his son, Rick, who suffers from cerebral palsy. Timex created an “I Am A Runner” Facebook app, which will collect all runners’ stories and will serve as a centralized host for submitted content and photos. Individuals who share their stories via the hashtag #IMARUNNER are eligible for opportunities to win Timex IRONMAN watches.

“Part of the attraction to the social strategy is that runners stories are so incredible that it translates to incredible content,” says Martin. “These people have kids, jobs and sometime handicaps. Most of them have no shot at winning the event they’re in and their really competing against themselves.”

Hard metrics from the campaign are not yet available. The “I Am A Runner” campaign is entering its second phase. Timex is a sponsor of the New York Marathon in November and the original Ironman triathlon in Kona Hawaii on October 13. More digital media, niche print and nice TV will be rolled out in the fall. Martin has the relative luxury of a wide open market, and is leveraging the brand equity of Timex. One of the things that he shares with his peers is awareness that sales and retail feedback are as important to this type of campaign as social media engagement.

“We have had great feedback from the retail community,” he says. “The overall brand has a nice halo effect for us, yet we’ve been able to step out and get an identity for Timex Sports. It’s a great category. After all, it’s 50 percent smaller than it should be. There’s a lot of room to grow.”

Adam Grenier of Hotel Tonight

The overall numbers for e-commerce are all growth. According to comScore data released last week, online sales grew 13% — to $50.2 billion — in the first quarter of the year. Overall, ecommerce accounted for 10.6% of discretionary dollars spent during the quarter — the highest share on record. There is a wild card in this deck however, and that is sales taxes. Congress has passed a bill that allows states to collect sales taxes from e-commerce purchases, and that will cut into e-commerce’s price advantage which was gained from a sales tax exemption.

As the Brand Innovators E-commerce Summit opens in San Francisco, brands, however, are not focused on cutting budgets or staff. They are focused on keeping sales and marketing momentum. As sales grow and unique user levels grow e-commerce companies have two data issues that will demand more attention than taxes. The first is the amount of data that customers generate from web traffic, social interactions and purchases. The second is the amount of data available for targeting, retargeting and other digital activities.

According to Wantful CEO John Poisson, his high-end gift discovery and sales site will focus on user experience and metrics.

“Core to the Wantful brand and value proposition is providing rich, compelling, and emotional experiences on all of our platforms: web, tablet, mobile and print,” Poisson says. “It can be challenging to quantify the effectiveness of some of the more qualitative aspects of what we do—visual design choices, or paper stock, for example—so we keep improving in these areas and look for a commensurate improvement in our metrics.”

There are no shortage of companies that are in the business of helping brands develop those metrics and the targeting necessary to engage consumers and generate data. MediaMath, for example, encourage brands to think about targeting as more than a two-step process of a cookie drop followed by an ad buy.

“Successful retargeting keeps consumers “in market” by leveraging a number of data points, including how recently they visited the site, how frequently they’ve seen ads, and what path they took to arrive at the site, whether it was from social media, search, or via an email newsletter,” says Erich Wasserman, co-founder, GM EMEA & APAC, MediaMath. “All of these data points can be used to determine when to bid on media, but that last element — the path — works for developing dynamic ad creative as well, tailoring the message directly to the consumer based on what they clicked to get there.”

Outside of the overall growth, the comScore report also tracked devices. For Q1, nearly half (48%) of time spent in the retail category occurred on mobile devices, with smartphones (34%) outpacing tablets (14%). That plays well for e-commerce brands like Hotel Tonight. According to Adam Grenier, director of Mobile Marketing for HotelTonight, mobile still presents data challenges.

The biggest data challenge for us is ensuring we’re able to track the entire user funnel back to any marketing efforts. That challenge is compounded by the fact we’re mobile only,” Grenier says. “Traditional methods such as cookie tracking don’t work the same way when you are in an App-Driven marketplace. We work with a variety of analytics companies with a mobile focus to be able to collect and make that data as actionable as possible.”

Unless you’re a “gearhead” or a fan of high-performance auto equipment you might not have heard of Nitto. But it is a great example of a challenger brand using digital marketing and unique positioning to gain market share and drive consumer engagement. The market positioning is all high-performance, NASCAR racing, and taking tires to a more aspirational level. It’s website is heavy on racers and colorful racing gear for street tires It has truck tires, but you won’t see a well-dressed hard hat loading a truck over them. You’ll see those tires scrambling over a desert off-road track.

“The market positioning is part of the history of the company,” says marketing strategist Stephen Leu. “In order to open the US market we emphasized niche products and high-performance product. When we looked at he bigger companies here we noticed they weren’t paying attention to the gearheads.”

Although its market share has yet to reach double-digits, Leu is comfortable with the brand’s US growth. According to TireReview.com replacement tires fell 1.5% in 2012, and are expected to rebound this year. A report from the site puts “independent” tire manufacturers at about 10 percent of the entire market.

Leu knows that Nitto is in a brand awareness battle and the brands digital content strategy reflects this, for the most part. Products like the RT100 are all about street flash and speed. The Motivo line, which is aimed more at the SUV customer, focuses more on technology and value. All programs are supported by an ambitious and highly structured brand ambassador problem. The Nitto Lightbox enables these brand ambassadors to post photos, artwork, videos and other consumer experiences in return for loyalty points and exclusive experiences.

“We give them a platform, we incentivize them and we give them a chance to shape our brand,” Leu says. “For a motorsports fan to have a chance to be part of a pit crew for race weekend – that’s a big incentive.”

It is also an economically efficient use of social media. “Nitto is taking an innovative approach to social media that directly addresses the challenge that many brands face when trying to organically reach and engage consumers on Facebook,” says Ajay Ramachadran, Dynamic Signal Chief Marketing & Product Officer. “They drive reach and impressions in the newsfeed of consumers without having to increase their Facebook ad spend by leveraging advocates and compelling social content.”

The ambassador candidates are identified via web traffic analysis, email interactions and social media. For the short-term future Leu says Nitto will increase the ambassador program, invest in more content driven marketing and create more digital marketing programs to amplify the brand’s voice and reach.

Create Ownable Moments: The effectiveness of Super Bowl ads, even with their digital tie-ins, spawns a yearly debate. At a ticket price that now tops $3 million, a select few brands can enter. GE thinks it has a better idea. Create your own Super Bowl. Leader, Social Media COE, General Electric, John Lombardo told the Brand Innovator’s Consumer Engagement Summit that creating “ownable moments” can rev up a social presence and lead to at least a version of real-time marketing.

“The experience is the brand on social media,” said Lombardo. “Ownable moments establish the brand as a pattern. Liking something doesn’t matter much anymore. Real-time marketing on social networks is less about Super Bowl moments and more about finding your own Super Bowl.”

GE saw its opportunity one week after the Ravens beat the 49ers. National Inventor’s Day (Feb. 11) celebrated GEs founder (Thomas Edison) and also embraces the innovative spirit that GE thrives on. The campaign invited inventors of all sizes and levels of sophistication to submit ideas. They ranged from sunglasses with built in MP3 players to remote shower starters. According to Lombardo, GE leveraged relationships with Twitter to combine paid and earned media exposure to “own” National Inventor’s Day. Although real-time results drove 78 of all interactions, he says that most of the Tweeted content was developed before the event kicked off. The Tweets checked in at 20x the standard volume for GE. A relationship with Buzzfeed also worked well, driving 326,000 new engagements for GE.

Find And Energize Ambassadors: At Mercedes-Benz they find ambassadors in Roger Federer. That’s easy. But it’s not the end of the ambassador search and recruitment for the brand. According to Mark Aikman, Social Media Lead, Mercedes-Benz USA, the brand sometimes has 300 or more events happening across the globe on a daily basis that attracts the kinds of consumers that will attract other consumers. The concept is simple, and existed for years before social networks made them easy to execute. However, finding the potential ambassadors is becoming a science.

“We’re looking for about a thousand fans,” said Jessica Elefante, Director of Digital Strategy & Public Relations, Materne NA/GoGo squeeZ. “They can be bloggers, influencers, or people that have interacted with us frequently. They can speak for others and they’re willing to build a deep relationship.”

Don’t Forget Employee Engagement: As Carlos Zepeda, VP Marketing, Alpargatas USA/Havaianas told the Summit “if you’re going to have a party, throw the first one at home.” Several brands including Pepperidge Farm spoke to the importance of employees as influencers and ambassadors. Zepeda says employee engagement and “relevance metrics” are built into compensation plans. “Employees are the best advocates,” he says, “They communicate the loudest.”

“It’s all about understanding the customer needs,” said Jeff Larson VP Global Marketing, Subway Restaurants. “You hear a lot these days about being ‘always on.’ I try to tell our team that its more about being ‘always in.’ The mission now is about generating relevant content and relevant messaging. It’s not about just being in the room when someone is talking about your product. It’s about having a relevant place in that conversation and listening carefully to it. In this business environment, you can’t be a lazy marketer.”

Larson’s theme was echoed by several brands throughout the day at the summit. It was dominated by strategies for finding and measuring valuable consumers and achieving business outcomes as a result. For example, Amy Buckley, Associate Director of Global Loyalty at Starwood Hotel and Resorts, talked about SPGs mission of surprising and delighting the company’s loyalty members as a way to keep them engaged with mobile apps, emails and digital properties. SPG is literally engaging customers on every step of their journey in order to drive business outcomes. The outcome it wants is more loyal customers. Like other panelists during the day, Buckley talked more about deeper and more active engagement than she did about customer acquisition or on boarding via engagement.

Host company Pepperidge Farm presented a case study on the growth achieved at least in part because of customer intelligence. Intelligence is a direct byproduct of its engagement. Now tied for the number one selling snack cracker in the US with Ritz, Director of Breakthrough New Business Development Patsy Fox told the summit that a consumer and branding audit in 2005 led to reassessment and repositioning of engagement strategies.

“We found at that time that with consumers, the brand had some issues with being clear, consistent, and targeted,” she said. “Our differentiation was slipping.”

Sales figures showed a slight slip in marketing share and that line extensions into the adult consumer segment were underperforming. Consumer intelligence showed that “mom influence” on purchases decisions were giving way to “kid influenced” decisions. The Goldfish team settled on focusing on kids ages four through ten as their key audience. The strategy to get and keep their attention was based on brand storytelling, characters, and poisoning Goldfish as “the snack that smiles back.” It was accomplished by creating four different Goldfish characters (Finn and friends) and featuring them in a web-based kid show called Goldfish Fun Zone. Combine it with events, print collateral and more digital engagement points and you have the current Goldfish brand, which has regained its momentum and more. It has 95% unaided brand awareness; it has more than 50% household penetration.

Many panelists focused in trying to define the intangibles of the moving consumer target. Brand love, affinity, being a fan, and moving from preferred to loved were some of the goals here. Brand marketers understand the words they want to see applied to products, but they still struggle with measuring it.

“How do we monetize emotion?” asked Eliot Lum, VP Strategic Marketing, Columbia Records. “How do we go from awareness to trial to converting to a fan? Those are important questions.”

And not completely answered at the summit. Several brands said they are still “working on” measurement for engagement initiatives. But they were almost unanimous on the next level of the journey to freeze the moving consumer: Virality.

“In our business consumer are making immediate decisions,” Larson says. “And we invest a lot of money in hundreds or marketing assets. We want to find a way for those assets to go viral. We want those assets to bring someone else outside the targeted consumer into the brand.”

“What,” the questioner wanted to know, “was the reaction from senior management when you presented this campaign?”

It’s usually a softball question. But in this case it wasn’t. The campaign D’Alessandris had just detailed for the gathering was a radical departure from the company’s previous conservative approach to male grooming. Because these days, shaving for men, especially young men, goes way beyond and below simple facial hair. His reaction betrayed the senior management’s original reaction, which was serious and somewhat doubtful. But when D’Alessandris laid out the results to the controversial “I’d FAQ me” campaign it became obvious that it has been a disruptive and successful use of digital and social media.

In case you haven’t seen it (and if you’re a young male, chances are you haven’t) the show campaign has its base in a pair of TV and commercials and online video spots that several 20-somethings wrapped in a post-shower towel in front of a mirror. Philips Norelco research (done with agency Ogilvy) showed this is an engaged and even emotional moment.

“When guys groom at that moment they think about the day and themselves,” said D’allesandro. “If grooming doesn’t go well, their confidence takes a hit. That’s why one of your taglines for the campaign is ‘more power to you.’”

There’s another tagline that’s a bit more provocative. As these guys shave with a Philips Norelco electric razor they like themselves more as they lose facial and body hair. “I’d wink at me,” says one. “I’d pop a bottle with me,” says another. At the end, all the fellas are so amped up they decide they would “FAQ me.” The FAQ is bleeped out; the mouth pixilated.

The spot is amplified by idFAQme.com, which scrolls Predator-like down the length of a man’s hair-free body, with pointed product benefits listed all the way down. It has been received on social media with a mix of criticism and cheers. The criticism is loud and angry. Here’s a typical Facebook post on the Philips Norelco page. “Your advertising department has run amok with this ad. It got my attention, but be certain that MY next shaver WON’T be Norelco!”

D’Allessandro is in the process of measuring the social media sentiment and whether the negative engagement is holding back the brand. Sales show however that its not. During the first week of the campaign (April 15) the company reported a sales lift for the shavers of 133 percent. For the next week it bounced 323 percent. For the week of April 30, another 323 percent bounce. Amazon sold out of Philips Norelco electric shavers during that time.

The campaign has its roots in the goal of consumer engagement. Philips Norelco has tried to engage young men with past campaigns, but never with this kind of disruption and engagement results. Given, some outrage has been produced. But it has engaged the targeted customer. And since that tense meeting with senior management, Philips Norelco has seen a dramatic sales lift.

“With a new advertising campaign you can’t please everyone,” D’Allesandris said. “The media plan needs to be super-focused and targeted on the right audience or you’re going to have a lot of super-offended people.”

The campaign is currently in the second wave. TV spots are run after 9pm. The Internet is always on though, and it will continue to run on AskMen.com, Funny or Die and other sites where young men can get engaged with new grooming and what D’Allesandris hopes will be a new razor.

These new strategies have centered around social content. Companies such as Pepperidge Farm, Chobani, GE, PepsiCo and Philips are all building powerful relationships with various customer segments by building resonant video, social imaging, shareable content and community-based marketing that increases brand affinity. The next step is measuring that brand affinity and then connecting it to revenue. In short: measuring customer engagement.

“The way I see what we do, and the way I see my job is moving our customers from preference to love,” says Michael Simon,
 Executive Vice President & CMO. “We need to be more than soup, salad and sandwiches.”

Panera has an array of community-based and cause-based programs that Simon believes can help move employees toward a more active and engaged role in stores and move customer affinity from prefer to love. Last November, for example, the Panera Bread Foundation launched a strategic alliance with Feeding America, the nation’s largest hunger-relief charity, to stock food banks in more than 75 markets with Panera’s Black Bean soup. This year the program served almost a million bowls of soup in four months.

Simon describes these programs as “culture-based” rather than cause-based and refers to the programs as “authentic” rather than a check-based philanthropy. They are the foundation of Panera. And they have been extended to Panera customers via a ramped-up digital media spend.

Panera took its digital spend up to 20% of total marketing this year. The results have been very successful and indicate a stronger engagement from customers. Using a marketing mix regression model Simon’s team has seen a $5 increase in sales for every $1 spent on digital marketing. It also initiated a 1:1 marketing effort that extended customized loyalty programs and customized content to 14 million customers. Nine million of them opted in for a customized loyalty program. Panera currently has more than 5,500 unique versions of its loyalty program.

“We worked more with paid social strategies, rather than just buying likes,” Simon says.

Content and measurement are also on the agenda at Chase. It wrapped a successful program this year called Chase Community Giving meant to engage the customer base and employees as an important strategic objective. According to Jorge Fontanez, VP & Marketing Manager, Chase Community Giving, its philanthropic or community-based efforts have never been based on customer acquisition. They are meant to nurture engagement, and he is working on creating more content at Chase that is more engaging and leads to better brand affinity.

“We want to engage and encourage sharing,” he says. “Everything is vote, promote and volunteer.”

At Chase, expect that to mean more community nurturing programs and a balance between online, offline and mobile efforts.

“We believe you use content to support the people who follow you,” says digital content director Hilary DuPont. “You never drop it and leave it. At a simple level it’s about talking to consumers rather than pushing your brand and care about what your consumers are doing. You listen.”

The dialogue has been music to the brand’s ears. According to Business Week, Chobani has gone from minimal revenue in 2008 to a $1 billion business in 2013. Greek yogurt now accounts for 36 percent of the $6.5 billion in total U.S. yogurt sales. The brand was built on grass roots marketing such as the traveling CHOmobile sampling truck and a prescient use of mixing traditional media with social media way before that strategy became commonplace. When Fast Company named it one of the 50 most innovative companies in the world for 2012, part of its citation read that “customers have been so expressive in sharing their crushes that Ulukaya built an ad campaign around them last year: ‘Chobani Love Stories’ doubled sales.”

It’s not resting on its laurels. Chobani has a three-pronged content strategy: social, blog and community. It uses content to actively build brand image and consumer engagement. And there’s a lot more behind these efforts than meets the eye.

First, social. DuPont says Facebook or Pinterest are aspirational efforts for the brand. They go beyond simple yogurt recipes and coupons. First, if it does contain recipes they are based more on a healthy lifestyle than they are obsessed with pushing the brand. “We’re all foodies,” says DuPont. “The content celebrates good food and good health. Instead of using sour cream or mayo in a recipe, yes we will consider adding yogurt instead.”

Chobani has a test kitchen, by the way. Recipes are tested before they’re posted.

The lifestyle angle is also celebrated particularly on Pinterest. You will find a fair amount of brand-oriented images for Chobani on Pinterest. But you will find more motivational messages.

“For Pinterest we curate the best of what we find online,” DuPont says. “We give credit where we can, we support a healthy lifestyle and make a connection with our customers in that way. We want people to din great content on Pinterest, we don’t need to necessarily push our product.”

The blog takes a more brand-centric approach and works in community efforts. Here’s you’ll see recipes for Cinco De Mayo, a piece on Chobani ingredient quality and a notice about Chobani’s support for National Bike Month. And a link to the brand’s newsletter.

Next up for DuPont and the Chobani team is to make the content approach more strategic. The amount of content on the social networks, blog, newsletter and other areas of the site has grown with the brand over the past year. How did it grow Now it is time to “analyze and optimize” the effort and the results.

As a brand that has its beginnings in word-of-mouth marketing Chobani has social media and its value built into its ingredients for success. CEO and founder Hamdi Ulukaya has been quoted as saying he “doesn’t know the old ways of doing business.”

Says DuPont: “We don’t have to prove to our founder that there’s a positive return on relationships.”

This year’s winners will be acknowledged at a special breakfast event at the Brand Innovators E-Commerce & Omni-Channel Retailing Summit at Trulia in San Francisco, on May 15th, from 8:00am-10:00am. The winners were selected by Brand Innovators based on overall marketing innovation, the ability to leverage digital media and emerging advertising technology platforms (including digital video, social media, mobile, content marketing, gamification, e-commerce, and Big Data) — and the implementation of “best-of-breed” marketing and advertising campaigns.

The winners include fashion, daily deals, discounts, members-only retailing and even one personal investment site. The complete list:

1. Airbnb
2. Art.com
3. BeachMint
4. Ditto
5. Dollar Shave Club
6. Ellie
7. The Honest Company
8. J.Hilburn
9. Hotel Tonight
10. JustFab
11. Joyus
12. Nasty Gal
13. NatureBox
14. Pickwick & Weller
15. Poshmark
16. The Real Real
17. Revolve Clothing
18. Stich Fix
19. Serena & Lily
20. ShoeDazzle
21. SoleSociety
22. StyleSaint
23. Tea Collection
24. Threadflip
25. Zulily

“The E-Commerce industry is booming and we are finding some of the best examples of marketing innovation and leadership coming from companies in this sector,” said Marc Sternberg, Co-Founder of Brand Innovators. “We are happy to acknowledge these ‘best-of-breed’ companies, and look forward to watching them grow.”

“Brand Innovators searched the West Coast for breakout companies that are not only innovating within their organizations but setting an example for the e-commerce industry overall. We’re extremely proud to share this list and we look forward to honoring each of the winner at our exclusive celebration on May 15th,” added Brandon Gutman, Co-Founder, Brand Innovators.

According to Forrester, e-commerce already accounts for about 8% of total retail sales in the U.S. It is expected to outpace sales growth at bricks-and-mortar stores over the next five years, reaching $370 billion in sales by 2017. By that time, e-commerce is expected to account for a full tenth of all retail sales in the U.S.

This is the first annual “E-Commerce Companies To Watch” list and event for Brand Innovators. It is the largest professional organization of brand marketers in America, including heads of digital, interactive, social, mobile, content marketing, data and analytics, and E-commerce at Fortune 500 and other leading brands. Its community has over 2,000 members from coast-to-to coast. Its Advisory Board consists of senior leaders from the CPG, beauty, automotive, financial services, travel, and consumer electronics industries. It will launch its online community platform in Q3, connecting all of members electronically.