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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A great example of content as marketing. This news and sundries stall in the San Francisco Ferry Building marketplace doesn’t have a lot to offer: magazines, maps and some kitchy souveneirs. What they do have is a great location: the main intersection in a major food, tourist and transit destination. And they know how to work with what they’ve got.
Look at where they sank their visual merchandising dollars. Not on fixtures, displays or signage but on an oversize clock and three large flat screen displays. The displays show transit schedules. Never mind that this is a small retailer in no way connected with any Bay Area transit agency. They have access, as we all do, to published transit schedules. And they’re repurposing that information as marketing content.
Thousands of people walk by their stall. Many, especially the tourists who no doubt make up the core of their customer base, will pause, interpreting the clock and schedule data as signifiers of transit information. Many will stop. Some will ask questions. A few will make use of the information on the monitors. But everyone who pauses, momentarily tricked into thinking the stall a source of travel information, will end up casting an eye across the display. And some of those passers by, now converted to traffic, will be converted to sales. All because the retailer understood what kind of content was relavant to its target customers and how to deliver it.
Bicycling magazine does a pretty good job of catching my attention. Daily (or nearly daily) email newsletters tease content on the website and in newsstand editions. For the most part, they are well targeted and well presented, leaning heavily on reviews and training tips to generate click-throughs to their site—exactly what one would hope for from a magazine publisher. (Brand marketers take note: real content generates real interest. Promotional messages, P.R. drivel and the umpteenth athlete profile generate yawns.)
But what really caught my attention this week was the header that ran above a review of 2010 bikes. In the banner above the reviews, a navigational area lists the bike categories under which the various reviews are classified. There are twenty-six of them. Twenty-six categories of bicycle, eleven flavors of mountain bikes alone. Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
As any soon-to-be parent knows, naming is hard work. What some brand managers don’t know is that it’s often plain unnecessary. Take Tully’s coffee, a Seattle chain of Starbucks-like coffee shops. Like Starbucks, they have decided to make up names for things we already have names for. In Tully’s case, the new terms apply to coffee taste rather than cup sizes. 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 »
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
Just got another marketing email from Nau and they seem to have swung back to the old brand identity. Path correction or the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing?
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 »
