The fashion giant Armani has extended its collaboration with Rihanna, started last year—in fall 2011, the brand launched the campaign for Armani Jeans and Emporio Armani Underwear featuring popstar from Barbados, who was also engaged in the creation of the new clothing items. In the previous promotion, the celebrity had a blonde pixie haircut, and now, for the new campaign she now has turned into a brunette and looks like a modern rock diva—the photos of the new 2012 Spring/Summer collections of the Armani’s both labels.

Nike Basketball proved that it ‘never stops’ (as the brand declared in the previous campaign) with the launch of the new marketing promotion starring basketball legend Kobe Bryant. He has reached remarkable success in his life and now, with his own example can inspire talented individuals around the globe to achieve yet bigger and bolder goals. This became the core point of the ‘The KobeSystem: Success for the Successful’ campaign, which spreads the athlete’s ‘Attack Fast, Attack strong’ philosophy and promotes his revolutionary new signature shoe, the Nike Kobe VII System Supreme.

Brands targeted at creative youth and adults often use social media sites and other web platforms to find new faces and minds for their promotions, and this crowdsourcing trend doesn’t seem to fade away in the coming years. Levi’s, the iconic jeanswear brand, which always encourages it’s consumers to go forth and think outside the box, has launched a casting on Instagram to find new people who will front the upcoming brand’s campaign.

The time around the first days of January is just perfect for making resolutions for the whole year, and since 2012 promises to be very sportive with the London Olympic and Paralympic Games, a plan for this year should include a bunch of sport related goals. Nike supports both renowned athletes and ordinary people who just like to keep fit and encourages them to make a pledge on Twitter on how they will #makeitcount in the coming 12 months.

Today, shoppers want sellers to be extremely inventive offering them the new products and services, and sellers really have a lot of resources to satisfy this quench for sophisticated approaches. Now, when digital is on the rise, brands often choose virtual space to get engaged with their consumers through various hubs and applications, primarily Facebook, iPhone or iPad ones. Zappos also followed the trend—the online show and apparel retailer, has released an iPad app entitled ‘Zappos Now’ (or ZN for short), in which an online store got merged with a digital fashion magazine.