High Altitude Marketeering

From the MEC website: woman trail running on a moss-covered log. Unless, they’re hawking golf cleats, I’m not sure how much sense this image makes.

Beginning in the mid-90s, retail analysts began talking about a shift in focus in in-store merchandising from simple product presentation to a more holistic store experience. New store concepts from Nike, Cabela’s and REI began to position retail stores as entertainment destinations where shoppers could interact with multimedia content centered around brand assets like new products, athletes and how-to information.

More than a decade later, many retailers have incorporated entertainment concepts into their stores. As you would expect, the strategy is also applicable online. Most brands with online direct sales platforms have merged the brand and product information approach of their pre-ecommerce websites with the nuts and bolts of presenting products and processing transactions online.

This non-product-content takes many forms, from travelogue look books at J. Crew to expedition videos at The North Face. Some brands, like Patagonia have created separate channels for their brand-related entertainment. In most cases, the content is keyed to specific products or serves a more general brand-building function.

Few retailers, however, take the pure entertainment approach, creating marketing content, like Super Bowl commercials, primarily to entertain. That’s why Backcountry.com’s Steep and Cheap email newsletter caught my eye.

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If you didn’t catch the brouhaha over bra colors this weekend, you can read about it on this Wall Street Journal blog. In the lightning-fast, news-and-analysis lifecycle, the status-posting campaign had hardly begun before it began to get deconstructed, analyzed, blogged and parodied.

The “fors” claimed that it helps raise awareness of breast cancer. The “againsts” call it worthless titillation. Whatever it was, it took off, probably exposing millions to the idea and building membership for anti-breast-cancer Facebook pages. To a marketer, those numbers sound like proof of a successful campaign. Great reach! Great frequency! Great work! Message delivered. Uh, what message? Read the rest of this entry »

Patagonia is a brand that’s not afraid to stick with what’s working. Its very first product, the Stand Up Short is still in the line after 37 years of service. The brand’s marketing collateral too, uses elements that have been in the creative mix for 20-odd years. The consumer catalog is no exception.

In terms of product styling, page layout, and the way product and non-product content is woven together, the books employ many of the same tropes they used in the early 80s. (Some would say the design look and feel is stuck there too but that’s a topic for another post.)

What struck me about the Heart of Winter 2010 catalog that came in the mail today was the sheer length of the editorial content. In comparison to most consumer catalogs, that statement is a double whammy. Few apparel catalogs have any editorial content at all. Except for a paragraph or two of brand fluff to position the brand or romance a collection, few books offer anything but vaguely emotive lifestyle photography and product images with corresponding product descriptions. Read the rest of this entry »

In researching a piece for SNEWS on how outdoor brands use expedition stories and images to define themselves, I connected with an Australian academic doing work on the ways sporting goods brands incorporate athletes and sponsorships into their marketing. While much of his work relates to brands partnering with professional sports teams, he has an interesting section on surf brands and their use of athletes and imagery. He could just as easily be describing the outdoor market: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been involved on and off in an online discussion about how to broaden the outdoor market’s consumer base. How, participants ask, do we reach age, ethnic and socio-economic groups outside the core user base?

MEC seems to be taking a stab at reaching younger consumers by encouraging their existing customers to recruit new customers in the 16–24 age range. Read the rest of this entry »

Fresh in my inbox this AM is a marketing email from Nau—or is it from Horny Toad. The lines are beginning to blur. I’ve been waiting to see signs of brand bleed as Horny Toad marketers begin to influence the Nau messaging. The new promotional email is the first hint that this is beginning to happen. Read the rest of this entry »

Every week, my inbox fills up with marketing emails from outdoor retailers and the brands they carry. They are, for the most part, straightforward promotional messages, focusing on a specific promotion or promotional items. Nau’s emails tend to be different—not surprising for a brand trying to stake out new ground. They are text-heavy, low on the promotion and heavy on the brand story and issues complementary to their brand message of sustainable manufacturing and environmental activism. I seldom read them.

But this week’s Nau email was different. Read the rest of this entry »

Coleman’s new ad campaign makes the tongue-in-cheek case that Coleman invented social networking. It makes a tenuous comparison between online socializing and socializing at a camp site. The campaign fails in a couple ways. Read the rest of this entry »

At first glance, Amazon’s new Kindle electronic book reader doesn’t seem to have much to do with the business of selling outdoor gear. But a recent TechCrunch article touched on an issue we’ve been wrestling with as we develop smarter ways to create dealer catalogs. TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid is skeptical about the future of the Kindle as the killer app for college texts because of major shortcoming: note taking functionality.

Buyers tell us that the ability to easily mark up a workbook, make notes and sketch out a buy is the best thing about printed dealer workbooks. Until there’s a note-taking technology that makes annotating an electronic workbook as easy as marking up a paper one, electronic-only solutions won’t work for buyers or reps. In reality, the hurtle might be even higher: first we need a technical solution, then we need time for users to get used to it as a medium for note taking. And that could take a while, regardless of where tech takes us.