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This is a great video about how you should look at your business, looking at trust and most importantly telling a story that your audience can really buy into.
In the video below Angela Ahrendts shares how brands can effectively target millennials and engage global audiences through digitally-led authentic and emotive storytelling.
You may have seen a post I put up a while ago about Angela Ahrendts and her move from Burberry to Apple. There was a video I posted with it called ‘Burberry’s Social Story’. In this video, Angela discusses ‘blurring the digital and physical worlds’. The first time I saw it, I thought it would be a while before we saw this more prominently in the retail industry, but since then I have seen much evidence to the contrary.
Have you been in Topshop recently? They are currently engaging in a brilliant digital-physical campaign. You all know of my love of Pinterest and Topshop has created a Pinterest campaign that works online and offline. Online, Topshop is encouraging Pinners to create a Christmas board with the tag #DearTopshop with the chance of winning some amazing prizes. This feeds into the Dear Topshop gift generator that I discussed in another previous post. So Pinners generate a gift and pin it onto their #DearTopshop Christmas board. Topshop can then see which items are pinned the most and they are highlighting these items in store. In the stores, the most pinned items have tags around them, letting shoppers know whats popular. They also have boards within the store promoting the #DearTopshop competition. So online, they are encouraging Pinners to shop Topshop online or in stores, and offline they are encouraging purchasing almost through a ‘Pinterest Seal of Approval’ as well as encouraging shoppers back online to Pinterest. It all comes full circle. One feeds into the other and in turn helps the other. Its a brilliant end to end campaign.
Topshop isn’t the only store engaging in this ‘Pinterest Seal of Approval’ idea.Nordstrom have a similar tactic of showing customers in stores what is popular on Pinterest. As well as this, they are offering free shipping for the most popular Pinterest items with a separate page dedicated to these items online. Target are also engaging in their own Pinterest campaign with an online store called ‘The Awesome Shop’ which is filled exclusively with their most popular items on Pinterest, while in store they also have the ‘Most Pinned’ tags.
These are just Pinterest examples, but there are many, many more examples using different digital platforms. Personally, I think its a very exciting time for retailers. Its time for shops to embrace digital and integrate it with their physical space and hopefully enrich the customer experience. Saul Berman of IBM recently wrote an article for Gigaom discussing how companies that embrace the digital-physical innovation, have more of an opportunity for success. Its time for retailers to use their imagination and to create ways of making digital-physical work for them.
Thanks to http://okaybee.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/blurring-the-digital-and-the-physical/
Imagine watching a fashion show live online, thousands of miles away from the actual event. A look comes down the runway, you click on it, and are able to browse all of its color options and add it to your cart without pausing the livestream. You could even, if you were quick enough, place an order for that look before the show finale began. Sounds pretty futuristic, if not entirely possible, doesn’t it?
This is exactly what global high street retailer Topshop is planning to unveil during the livestream of its S/S 2013 show at London Fashion Week at 3 p.m. GMT on Sunday. Viewers will not only be able to click on clothes and accessories to browse color options in real-time, they’ll also be able to change the music, download the show soundtrack from iTunes, snap screenshots to share instantly on Facebook (a feature that was developed with in-house Facebook engineers), cut and share video clips, and order looks and makeup appearing on the catwalk
Love the technology around this idea, hopefully the conversion rates/interest will see other brands try something similar, even the non fashion businesses.
In the last few years social media has been seen as an add-on to marketing activity, however there are now a number of well documented cases where social media is becoming an intrinsic part of businesses and a few where it is the fundamental function. Organisations of all sizes are now waking up to how they are engaging with their customers whether B2B or B2C and how social media can help them drive client acquisition, customer service and alternately profitability.
C24 try to keep abreast of all the latest business and technology trends to help our clients and alternately their clients. During research we have highlighted a number of technology trends that we believe will be important or at least very interesting over the next two years.
Retail: Social media has changed and is continuing to change how we shop, now is possibly the most important time in the history of retail for retailers to think about how they are engaging with their clients within the social media landscape. Latest technology updates from Facebook and Amazon now allows shoppers to get access to their friends tastes and to discover new tastes, the ‘earned’ media points are now becoming increasing valuable possible more valuable than celebrity endorsements that brands pay extraordinary amounts for.
Other interesting developments in this arena is the group buying sites concept, so much so that at the time of writing this blog according to the New York Times Google is preparing a $6 billion offer for Groupon truly signifying their value of this particular technology. Groupon for those who don’t know emails or tweets limited-time discounts to users each day, but a certain amount of people must respond to make the deal a reality, sometimes with discounts up to 90%. Is this business worth $6 billion, well Google thinks it is.
Other retail models are being tested all the time however it is vitally important that retail organisations test the existing and new models and think about how they are presenting products and interacting with new and existing clients. The next few years will be an extraordinary time to be involved in retail marketing.
Another area that is gaining significant momentum is co-created content, where brands and consumers work together on content that for instance can highlight how the product is being used, or modified or in some cases idolised. Some companies even allow users to place design images online and get all users to vote on the best design and then put it into production really creating a community driven business model. Companies that have made a success of this type of model are Nike iD and Burberry, however there are countless smaller companies who are thinking outside the box and making a real success. This type of strategy is allowing consumers to get intimately involved with brands and drive true value and the creation of small micro brand communities.
Finally mobile, C24 have discussed many mobile technologies and adoptions strategies, however it is one of the most important business areas of tomorrow, Google recently shared with us that 10% of its search volume is mobile and this figure is growing considerably by the month. Location based services introduced by Facebook, foursquare etc are now driving the adoption of geo-localised marketing and allowing brands to consider where their consumers are at any particular moment and how they would like to engage.
Up until now most businesses have seen the mobile platform as a simple extension of their website, however with growth predictions for mobile devices considerably outstripping desktops and Moore’s law predictions showing a 10 times increase in power now is the time to see the mobile device as an opportunity to bridge the gap between the online and offline world. Organisations need to start to think about how the mobile can start to enable them to engage more and how that will enable them to increase the amount of times the ’till rings’. The future really is mobile.
So in conclusion the next few years (especially in retail and B2C) we and others believe will be shaped by new social media models, co-created content and earned media points and empowered mobility devices. We all really need to watch this space.
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