That doesn't mean that you don't have to make changes, however. You may have seen Nordstrom's "Reinvent" campaign. It's all about updating the company brand and about offering a greater selection of modern merchandise, while still maintaining the Nordstrom classic look. Ultimately, our job is to enhance our reputation for providing the best service possible for our customers. That's one thing that will never change.

Contact Kathryn Olson by email (kathryn.olson@nordstrom.com).

Sidebar: New Tools of the Marketing Trade

Being a marketer means being in the know -- about new developments in the field, new preferences among your customers, and new ways to reach people and to measure results. Maybe that's why there are so many Web sites, information services, and other digital resources designed to meet marketers' needs. Here are six of the best marketing sites we've seen.

ClickZ Corp.: (www.clickz.com) Here you'll find more than 20 columns on a wide range of marketing topics, such as branding, email marketing, media buying, and startup marketing. Whether you're a vice president of marketing or a PR specialist, ClickZ will have something for you. Just sign up at the site and select the columns that you'd like to receive -- they'll be delivered right to your inbox. You can also subscribe to the ClickZ Discussion Forum, an email group where members can debate online-marketing issues.

eMarketer Inc.: (www.emarketer.com) This site collects research studies and helps make sense of them. For a fee, eMarketer will gather, organize, and distill data from over 100 of the leading research services into easy-to-read tables, charts, and graphs.

Iconocast: (www.iconocast.com) Any marketer who wants to stay on top of the Net should subscribe to this free email newsletter. It has insight on the latest news, analyses, and trends that are affecting online marketing. But what really makes this newsletter a must-read is the dish in an insider gossip column called "The Jacobyte."

Personify Inc.: (www.personify.com) This site's products help you figure out who your Web-site visitors and customers are, what you should feature on your site, how effective your email campaigns are, and how this information can be used in offline-marketing efforts. These tools aren't cheap -- prices are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

PlanetFeedback Inc.: (www.planetfeedback.com) How many marketers don't need to know what their customers think about their products and their services -- the good, the bad, the ugly? When it becomes active next month, this site will give consumers a place to submit their complaints, compliments, and suggestions, and then it will forward the feedback to the appropriate companies.

Vividence Corp.: (www.vividence.com) This site hosts online focus groups to see what users think of your site and those of your competitors by asking questions while people are actually using the site. The users are members of Vividence's testing community who have agreed to participate in the test.