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5 Brand Activation Tips For Retailers To Cross The Digital-Experiential Divide

1Luis Camano GrupoGallegosIn order to drive consumer actions in the moment, it is essential that brands pay attention to where consumers have been on their journey and where they’re going next, be it online or to the mall, and find creative ways to engage.

To quote Amanda Hansen’s article in Ad Age: “Brand activation that resonates with customers and achieves results calls for strategic planning that starts with ‘why.’ Why will your target audiences care? Why would they engage? Then focus on the how.”

Key to all of this is paying attention to what we already know about the consumer (often a matter of connecting, analyzing and interpreting data) and then creating clever and non-intrusive ways to engage and deliver value.

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Here are five tips and examples of how retailers are creatively activating their brands to engage consumers across the digital-experiential divide.

1. Pay Attention To Purchase History

Retailers must consider a lot of data when determining how to engage with customers. But the volume of data you have access to doesn’t mean much if you aren’t able to do anything with it. One of the easiest ways to tune out the white noise is to focus on the customer’s purchase history. Burberry is very good at leveraging data from the whole of the customer’s experience with the brand to create a simple, intuitive customer journey.

In order to do this well, you first need to connect data across different systems, which can be technically complex and expensive. So why do it? Because getting to a unified view of the customer and enabling people across your retail enterprise to access and act on that data is key to providing the customer a great experience and remove obstacles to future purchases.

Even more importantly, Burberry crosses the divide in terms of bringing creative into the mix. Great at data? Good. Great at creative, even better. Great at both? Now you’re standing out from the crowd and engaging the consumer in ways very few other retailers do. That’s what we want to aim for, always.

In short, by focusing on purchase history as a predictor of purchase intent and finding fresh, creative ways to engage, the delight of your customers (and their Lifetime Value) will increase and your brand will benefit by standing out as smart enough to know and understand the customer in ways others do not.

2. Branded App Experiences Should Change With Context

Brands that understand the importance of mobile sometimes use branded apps to foster easier engagement with customers on mobile devices. The idea is to leverage the technology to connect with the consumer in micro-moments. The critical mindset for brand marketers to adopt when planning branded apps is to think of the medium not as a sales channel, but as a way to engage with customers in between their purchases.

To foster this engagement and move the customer from mobile to in-store engagement, it is important that the consumer’s in-app experience changes with their physical context. So, as I enter your store and your beacon detects that I have your branded app and have recently been shopping online for patio furniture, you should automatically adjust my in-app experience to reflect that — perhaps by replacing my app’s normal splash screen with an in-store map directing me to the outdoor living section.

Of course, hopscotching from remote to in-store technology (e.g. network connectivity to beacons) is easier said than done. The technologies are actually quite distinct and the ideal engagement experience changes drastically based on the user’s unique behavioral signals (there we are back to the importance of data again). But committing yourself to meeting the technical and creative challenges of adapting in-app experience as the customer moves in and out of different physical locations will ID you as a smart brand — a highly valuable position to occupy in the consumer’s mind.

3. Use Social To Make Digital Demand Drive In-Store Sales

Social media is a wonderful way to reach customers and amplify messaging, build emotional connections and reward brand advocates. But using social effectively is not as simple as if you Facebook, they will come.

For starters, different generations have different tastes for social media: As the Harvard Business Review notes: “Seniors, Boomers and Gen Xers still like to curl up with a magazine. Millennials are turning to Facebook and Twitter, while Gen Z, or the iGeneration, is skeptical of brands and places more value on peer-to-peer reviews — even from strangers.” So, there is no one social media to rule them all. Targeting based on your customer’s demographics and known behaviors and doing so across different digital channels and screens is key.

Nordstrom is one retailer that has done an excellent job of using social media tactics to create in-store opportunity. For example, when Nordstrom studied their customers’ data and social tastes, they discovered a strong affiliation to Pinterest as a preferred means of compiling and sharing information about possible purchases.

Flexing their ‘cre-dat-ive’ muscle to leverage the opportunity, Nordstrom fostered a social community that invited users to ‘Pin’ their favorite or most desired shopping items. This led to the creation of a customer’s Top 10 list, which Nordstrom then featured in its physical stores. This a tremendous example of elegantly engaging customers in social to create in-store transactions, thereby crossing the digital-experiential divide.

4. Create Converged Experiences

Kate Spade is a very clever retail brand. They excel at finding new ways to converge digital and physical experiences that are organic to the customer’s behavior. One well-known example has to do with how Kate Spade used some vacant storefronts in New York to create an interactive shopping experience.

Kate Spade occupied the vacant shops, created small but eye-catching displays of some of their clothing and accessories and set up a large touchscreen that allowed customers, at any time of the day or night, to stop, click a few buttons and order items for delivery within an hour anywhere in the city. Understand that there was no traditional retail presence (i.e. you could not actually go inside the store, touch the items, or speak with a sales clerk).

What an extraordinarily creative way to activate their brand!

Kate Spade took an online shopping experience, rented out some vacant property to put their brand in high-traffic areas frequented by the brand’s target customers, and made it easy for the customer to engage with and make a purchasing decision. Kate Spade did this without being intrusive (the customer was going to walk by anyway) and managed to make the entire experience delightful and, very importantly, convenient.

5. Convenience Is King

Often, one can tell something of emerging industries posed for aggressive growth by tracking the movement of top executives, particularly those charged with multi-channel revenue production. To this end, it was interesting to see Brad Dickerson, who helped grow Under Armour to $4 billion in annual revenue, recently make the jump to become CFO of Blue Apron, an early standout in the burgeoning ‘convenient food’ economy.

Blue Apron, which delivers fresh, pre-portioned ingredients for home cooks to create healthy tasty meals, was founded in 2012. The company shipped just 20 boxes of meals in its first week. Today it delivers more than a million meals a month. This success comes from Blue Apron figuring out that convenience is something consumers universally crave and then devising a creative solution to appeal to that organic truth. Yes, we can choose to stop by your shop to pick up a few things on the way home, but why should we have to in order to do something as basic as enjoy a nice meal?

Blue Apron is certainly not the only example of a company finding ways to cross the digital-experiential threshold in meaningful and scalable ways — Plated, Chefday, and HelloFresh compete in the food space and there are hundreds of other convenience plays disrupting other sectors (eyewear, for one).

The important takeaway for retailers from all of this is simple: The consumer’s absence from your physical store is not necessarily indicative of indifference, or disloyalty, to your brand. Sometimes, we’ve just got other things to do and would like an easier way to shop and transact. Find creative ways to engage and delight us when we are elsewhere, online or out and about in the world, and we will become and remain your delighted customers.


Luis Camaño is Director of Brand Activation for Grupo Gallegos, responsible for leading the newly-formed agency group while working alongside peers in the creative, strategic and account leadership disciplines. Camaño previously was the freelance executive creative director at Alcone Marketing. He also served as chief creative officer with Alcone for nearly 11 years, working with brands such as Pepsi, Arby’s, Coca-Cola, California Lottery, Jose Cuervo, Volkswagen, Microsoft, LG Mobile, Logitech, Nestlé and Jagermeister. Before joining Alcone, Camaño served as a creative director with amp.

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