Target, Inc.

Walmart maintains its No. 1 spot on a new list of the best retail brands, and even with a 6 percent decline in brand value it preserves an enormous margin over the next closest brand. Four brands increased their brand value by more than 25 percent this year, while others fell off the list completely.

Because we know it's important to stay on top of your retail customer's strengths and weaknesses, we're bringing you new research findings from our sister publication, RIS News, which benchmarks the progress of omnichannel strategies in retail.

While Black Friday (and now Thanksgiving Day) is the traditional kick off to the brick-and-mortar holiday shopping season, both days continue to grow in importance online. Meanwhile, Cyber Monday reached $1.735 billion in desktop online spending, representing the heaviest online spending day in history.

Today's digital channels have and will continue to fundamentally transform the consumer experience, creating a new class of more informed and more demanding shoppers. As a result, we are also now seeing a blurring of the traditional lines between trading partners, where the "war for the consumer" may actually be yielding to a truer form of collaboration than we've ever seen.

Target is rolling out a series of updates to the Target app this fall, including location-based and in-store features designed to enhance the in-store experience.

With the growing competition from Amazon.com across all sectors in which it competes, brands like Target, Best Buy, Walmart and others are looking to understand how to better compete against this ubiquitous retailer. Results from a new study show that many retailers have a way to go; specifically, for most brands measured, the local store outperforms its online counterpart.

Designed to meet the increasing demand for healthy food products at a great price, Target is introducing Simply Balanced, a new food collection within its owned brand portfolio.

Despite being far more tech-savvy than previous generations, Generation Y, the 80-million strong cohort of Americans between the ages of 18 and 35, has not forsaken shopping in stores for online purchasing. Even more surprising are some of the brands they love best, including Walmart, Target and Kmart for groceries.