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.
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 »
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 »
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 some point in every discussion of sales collateral, someone says “Let’s just put it online.” With the current pressure to reduce marketing spending making it even more attractive to move away from printed catalogs, it makes sense to look at the pros and cons of this electronic-only approach to sell-in materials.
The desire to abolish paper catalogs isn’t new. Back in the 90’s, brands were playing with the idea of publishing dealer catalogs on CD. Since then, new technologies have enabled everything from a catalog on a thumb drive to dealer websites. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should. New technologies may add new tools to your marketing tool kit but it’s just as important as ever to make sure that you’re using the right tool for the job. Read the rest of this entry »
Backpacker Magazine posted this to Twitter yesterday afternoon:
Newbie campers are coming—get ready for a crowded summer: http://tinyurl.com/d2o6gp
The link is to a blog post that in turn references this CNN piece on a potential boom in car camping this summer. Never mind the issue of newbies crowding out state-park regulars. A growth in car camping participation is welcome news for outdoor specialty retailers and suppliers. And Walmart. Uh, especially Walmart.
Chances are that the bulk of the newbies will be inclined to buy the sort of down-market camping goods available in the big box sporting goods and general merchandise stores. But there’s also a good chance the camping spike will manifest among more affluent consumers. It may even surface some ex-campers looking to get their game back. Both of these latter groups are likely to frequent a specialty retailer. The bottom line is that anybody who sells camping gear is likely to encounter more newbie campers than they would in a “normal” spring. So how do you make the most of this new traffic. Tips for retailers follow. Read the rest of this entry »
There are a few perks for outdoor industry types. Pro deals. Bringing your dog to work. And making fun of mainstream marketers’ horribly misinformed use of outdoor imagery. A perennial classic is the motivational poster. So, when I saw the new MasterCard ad in the back of this week’s New Yorker, I was ready for a healthy dose of self-righteous mockery.
On second glance, though, it wasn’t so bad. The gist of the ad made sense. The gear was the real thing and the photo didn’t look too goofy—a little staged but clearly not shot by a commercial photographer on a day trip from Manhattan. However, the dollar figure for the gear total seemed a little low. A Mountain Hardware expedition tent and a Nikon digital SLR? We had to be talking more than two grand. A quick trip to REI.com and Backcountry.com resolved the issue. Here’s the bill:
Black Diamond Vaporlock Carabiner : $14
Mammut 60m 10.5mm Dry Rope : $210
Mountain Hardwear Wraith -20° Bag : $555
Mountain Hardwear EV3 Tent : $750
MSR Pocket Rocket Stove : $40
Snow Peak Titanium Cook Kit : $40
Mountain Hardwear Trance Pack : $169
Nikon D40 Digital SLR Camera : $530
Grand Total : $2,308
Pretty close to MasterCard’s $2,106 tally. Given the choice of gear and the fairly authentic-looking mountain shot, I’d say there was a designer at MasterCard’s ad agency who knew a thing or two about playing in the woods. What’s more impressive is that it didn’t get watered down by an account manager or client-side comments like “aren’t tents supposed to be green?”
I was also pretty sure the location shot was a stock photo. It took all of five minutes to find it here at Getty Images. What, you didn’t think they actually sent a photographer above treeline, did you?
In a super nerdy outdoor footnote, the shot is taken on Ruth Mountain in the North Cascades, a walk-up, but one with a Fred Beckey pedigree. It’s pretty much a daytrip so the EV3 and -20 bag might be overkill.
REI’s most recent marketing email tries hard to fill the void between back-to-school and holiday shopping. Too early for winter sports and too late for summer camping gear, October is not a great month for hard goods. To drum up excitement, the retailer has landed on one of my favorite come-ons, the create-a-category marketing initiative. This season’s newest category: the three-and-a-half-season tent. Here’s the blurb from the email:
“Our all-season, lightweight REI ASL Tents bridge the gap between backpacking and mountaineering tents.”
It’s on strategy for the season. We’re nearing the end of the three-season tent window and the majority of REI’s customers just aren’t willing to pony out $400 for an expedition tent. So there’s some sense in creating a category to fill that niche.
On the other hand, it’s a pretty small niche. My guess is that most campers hearty enough to go winter camping are hard core enough to beg, borrow or steal their way to a real mountaineering tent. And anyone not at least a little skeptical of an “expedition lite” tent is probably going to be spending fall weekends watching football. Still, REI gets a A for ingenuity.
The next thing you know, somebody will invent a category of outerwear for the gap between raining and not raining. They might even call it “soft shells.”
