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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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 »
Twitter has new terms of service out. While I have neither the patience nor the legal chops to parse the small print of the actual terms, I did read the overview, a post by founder Biz Stone on the Twitter blog.* Part of it reads:
Ownership—Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.
While I’m no IP lawyer, my business makes me conversant with copyright speak and this sounds an awful lot like a grant of copyright. The only thing missing in the laundry list of ceded rights is that of the right to claim authorship. Judging from the rest of the language, that is the only sense in which your words still belong to you.
Why care? Well, if you’re an outdoor brand or athlete streaming realtime tweets about an expedition, you’ve just granted Twitter as much right as you have to publish your story. You may have authored the words, but you’ve now given Twitter co-ownership, very different from what happens wher you just post the stuff to a blog.
* What’s equally interesting is that, if you read the actual terms, the Stone-quoted phrase doesn’t actually appear in the terms of service. Not sure what that means but It calls into question exactly what rights you’re really giving away. See for yourself: http://www.twitter.com/tos
I’m guessing there aren’t a lot of golfer-climbers out there. Leisure activities tend to map to lifestyle and your average country club member and a Camp IV dirtbag are unlikely to share the same hairdresser. They may, however, have more in common than you think.
I have two friends who land at opposite ends of the middle-aged lifestyle spectrum. One is a huge golfer, an every-waking-hour, never-sees-his-kids kind of golfer. The other is a backcountry addict, an ex-NOLS, cache-to-cache kind of camper. But when you ask them why they do what they do, their answers are remarkably similar.
Bill, the golfer, will say he loves golf because it’s just him and the ball. When he steps up to the ball, everything else falls away. What’s left is the kind of purity you don’t find in everyday life. He can hit the ball well. Or he can blow it. But it’s entirely up to him. Read the rest of this entry »
