High Altitude Marketeering

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.

The email newsletter/ad is called The Daily Dose and highlights a few of the products to be featured on Steep and Cheap’s upcoming one-time deals. It also has a big chunk of unrelated body copy.

But before I sample and critique I should first come clean with my plain out admiration for Backcountry.com’s commitment to good content. Their product descriptions and spec listings are thorough. Their review content and functionality is good. And, most importantly, their blog, The Goat, stands out for copy (mostly Rocky Thompson’s) that’s informative, funny, and just plain well written.

The Daily Dose copy, however, is strictly for entertainment purposes. Here’s a sample:

When I go to a new liquor store, I look for a liter bottle of Jamison. If it’s $40, I laugh in the face of the clerk and walk out. If it’s $35, I’ll maybe buy one thing and never come back. If it’s $28, I’m a customer for life. It’s important to have a fixed-cost good that you can use to gauge whether or not the place you’re shopping is grossly overpriced, but it’s difficult in most situations. A liquor store is not one of them.

The copy, while amusing, is completely unrelated to the products the email is hawking. Instead, it usually consists of random musings of the where-do-missing-socks-go variety.

Such non-content is intended partly as a humorous foil to the promotional content of the rest of the email. It also functions as a parody of the kind of lame marketing body copy that prevails in catalogs and e-retail. Nobody reads the stuff anyway, the thinking goes, and if somebody does read that crap, it doesn’t really tell them anything. So why not cut to the chase and write nonsense. It’s the sort of thing Moosejaw introduced a few years ago with random blog entries about dating and direct mail campaigns consisting of lobster bibs.

Good strategy for Steep and Cheap? Probably. Though it will be annoying to some, the approach lets Backcountry.com leverage the promise of a funny bit of writing to increase the chances that a regular recipient will open the email. And overall, it pairs well with the deal-a-day model, a retail pitch that’s more about impulse-buy-entertainment than it is about serious need-fulfillment shopping.

What’s most interesting, though, is the use of pure entertainment to reward the reader for interacting with a promotion. While this is nothing new for folks like Evian, it stands out in an industry where most marketing is keyed to the serious business of sports and outdoor survival.

Backcountry.com is nibbling away at a problem that plagues most outdoor brands: the things they choose to talk about are not very interesting, even to a large percentage of their core customers. Athlete profiles, expedition stories and product demos quickly begin to sound like the same old story. Brands have trouble differentiating and offer little to entice consumers to return for more content. With The Goat, niche portals that speak directly to subsets of its consumer base, and the Daily Dose, Backcountry.com is able to put a lot of brand distance between itself and competitors like REI, EMS and Altrec.

This approach won’t work for everyone. Arc’teryx has little to gain from humorous content—it’s just too far from the personality of the brand. But traditional outdoor brands have a lot to learn from what Backcountry.com is doing. The right mix of pure entertainment content, if it’s in line with the overall brand personality, could add life to an industry in which brands seem increasingly to be telling the same story.