Multichannel marketing: How can campaigns across magazines, tv, online, catalogues and smartphones capture heartland consumers? that was the question posed to marketing executives at a lunch Sponsored by New Idea and hosted by Ragtrader last month. Assia Benmedjdoub reports from the front line.
Throughout the course of 2009/2010, Ragtrader has reported on Australian breakthroughs in multichannel retailing, from studies and seminars staged by the local industry groups to specific initiatives launched by domestic retailers and wholesalers.
Over a three-course lunch at leading Melbourne restaurant Cutler & Co, a selection of retail communication executives revealed how they extended this multichannel approach to marketing. Ragtrader asked the panel to highlight specific campaigns and strategies, with the key talking points documented below.
Ragtrader: Sportsgirl is obviously one of the key retailers people are looking at in terms of multichannel strategy – you’ve got an entire community built around social media, the website, the e-store, the physical stores, blogs, Sportsgirl TV. The latest frontier is mobile phones. Can you tell us more about that, Kate?
Sportsgirl: What we’ve launched is a mobile site: it has the full content of our website but is formatted differently for mobile phones. Now it has a lot of pull-down options instead of the flash features on our homepage. The best thing about the site is it allows girls to shop anywhere – you can be on the tram and buy a Sportsgirl top, shop on the go. We haven’t launched a mobile phone application as yet, it’s on its way. The process of getting an app up and running is actually quite tedious. You have to go directly through Apple, they have to approve it and there’s no indication when that will happen. There won’t really be a difference when the app launches. It means that girls will be able to go to the iTunes store – there will be an icon on our website – and download music. It’s a free app.
Ragtrader: What about Belinda from Jeans-west? Another fast fashion retailer – how important is that area for you?
JeansWest: I think our market is quite wide at the moment; we’ve got a big demographic so we’re exploring these platforms, we’re aware of them. The website is doing really well in terms of sales. We thought denim would be a bit difficult to sell online because people want to try it on, make sure it’s the right stretch, the right fit but it’s actually our best selling item. Especially the specialty denim – the extra long and the maternity styles. Obviously we do Google AdWords [advertising] to prop ourselves up. If someone is searching for maternity denim, we’re up there. I think people find these styles quite hard to purchase, so when they find them, they really grab them with both hands. And it’s great to see the returns rate so low: it means they’re fitting, they’re working.
Ragtrader: It’s interesting you say the specialty items are selling well. It’s all in niche products, TS14+?
TS14+: TS14+ is a plus size retailer: we specialise in clothes for women sized 14 to 24, which is a niche market. We currently have 102 stores, including our online store which is consistently one of our top stores. Our online store is an incredible avenue for us to reach our customers. We’ve just launched our new website, which has taken us to next level with sales and we’re only at stage one. We’ve boosted the functionality of the site: the size and clarity of the images, the styling and colour ways, zoom options, up-sell and cross-sell options. We’ve really grown with our online store, beginning seven years ago with a very rudimentary website that had one order a month! One of the features of the next stage is that you will be able to buy in outfits. We show an entire outfit and with the click of one button, you choose your size and that’s it, you’ve bought the whole outfit. We’ve found that the more you educate the customer, the more you prescribe and show how to wear it, they will literally buy that entire outfit.
Ragtrader: Is it easy for TS14+ customers to buy online?
TS14: We’ve always had a really good online market, even internationally because our styling is different to other plus size clothing. A plus size woman is not always comfortable in going into stores and trying things on, so it’s a confidence issue. To buy online, try it on at home and have a hassle-free returns policy has been an incredible tool for us. Once she knows her size, then the returns and exchanges drops. And the customer found us in the beginning. We may be early adopters in having an online store for so long but we are behind in AdWords, we don’t really do that. There are areas we can grow.
Ragtrader: Is it harder for a player like Cotton On, having so many stores and product options?
Cotton On: We have about 638 stores, more so in the last few years. We’ve also created three other brands. As far as online goes, we are about to launch a store for T-Bar, a t-shirt company we bought out recently. That’s basically another brand for us. It makes sense for us to go online for this because it’s just t-shirts. For the Cotton On brand, we started online just selling gift cards. There’s too many SKUs for us to sell the entire product through an e-commerce site. We basically select the key pieces from the collection and show these online through catalogues and look books and flash campaigns.
Ragtrader: What about Witchery – there’s been a recent move to create fashion videos for the website each season?
Witchery: We’ve completed two films so far: one for autumn/winter and then we’ve got one for spring/summer this year. When we first launched it, it was like an add-on for our main campaign. With summer, we’ve got a strategy about how we can get this movie out to more consumers. We’ve partnered with the movie Eat Pray Love: we’ve got the Witchery film at every preview screening, Australia-wide. From a marketing perspective, it’s great for us because our whole campaign for the season is all about ‘the journey’.
Ragtrader: How did this come about?
Witchery: We approached the distributors directly because it met our main objective, which was to get our film out to a much wider audience. It also met their objectives, because we promoted the movie through our stores with for example, Eat Pray Love postcards, and through an online competition. We tied it back with our campaign: share your journey with us, celebrate Eat, Pray, Love. It was a true partnership in the sense that both parties met their objectives. With the Witchery movie, it was one way to get it out there. We also seeded it to bloggers, our Facebook and Twitter sites and our Youtube channel which has been hugely successful. Our online business, we’ve had that for nine years. We’re at a time now where we’re really evolving. There’s so many new players coming into the market, so much competition so you’ve got to keep growing.
Ragtrader: But feedback on social media sites and blogs can be very hostile – how do you manage that?
Witchery: I think it’s incredibly important to be transparent. We leave the negative comments up there on our Facebook page – we actually go back and share that feedback with our team. That singlet is not fitting right or the fabric isn’t washing properly. We’ve actually asked our Facebook followers to help us find a site in Tasmania, because so many of them were asking us to open there. It’s very, very hard to find locations in Tasmania and we’re using that channel to our advantage. Literally. “Do you have any contacts in Tasmania?” That kind of thing. Feedback is great for our business as it helps us grow and constantly look at ways to improve – the last thing we want is to block it. We welcome the positive feedback as well!
Ragtrader: Moving into a slightly older demographic – how does a brand like JAG utilise multichannel retail and marketing?
JAG: We’re not necessarily baby boomers – our target is probably more Gen X, which is very much in tune with all the new technology. They’re still adopters. It’s about what time they are in their lifecycle – they’re still working, full time, maybe with children. It makes sense for them to shop online and we’re launching that for JAG consumers soon. It will be the first for the Colorado Group. For us, we’re only at 26 stores at the moment, and we’re keen to get more stores because the demand is there. We are opening up a few stores but I think online is also a great way to spread the brand. We’ve got a lot of customers in regional Australia; we can’t be everywhere so that’s one way for us to reach them.
TS14+: That’s another useful thing about online – you can see where demand is for a retail store. We really want to open a store in Launceston (Tasmania) but we can’t find one. We have a store in Hobart but prior to that, a lot of Tasmanians were coming up and buying product in Victoria or through our mail order. They were letting us know they really wanted us to be there!
Ragtrader: Bardot has an e-commerce function. Is there more planned for this area?
Bardot: It’s certainly important for us. We’re launching a new website in November; making it a bit more sophisticated, with bigger pictures, more detail on the products and more product in general. At the moment we don’t have a lot up there – just in terms of how long it can take to shoot each item and get it on the website. Our customers are spending a lot more time researching though – looking at our product, what’s on there and then going in store and purchasing it. Our online store still does quite well, definitely very important especially when it comes to thinking outside of the Australian market. In terms of our online traffic, the US market comes in after Australia, even though we don’t do any marketing for that country.
Sportsgirl: The same happened with Sportsgirl when we first launched our website. We received international traffic but didn’t do any advertising at all. It’s just the general product people are looking for when they tap into search engines.
Ragtrader: So does site content then become more important – to let customers in on your story, whether they’re domestic or international?
JeansWest: It is absolutely important. Our site at the moment is very online-shopping-focused, so there’s not a lot of content on there for people, which we want to introduce because there needs to be a point of contact. Behind-the-scenes videos, styling tips, reviews of events that are happening. We don’t field any international orders right now, just Australia and New Zealand. We’ve got franchises in the UAE and other markets, so stores of their own. Our holding company has over 500 Jeanswest stores in China. They are quite different, the product is very different and they have their own websites. We’ve got a Facebook page that does pretty well. I think we’ve got about four and a half thousand likes.
Ragtrader: Do any of you have specific online campaigns for international markets?
Witchery: We do have a tailored marketing strategy for some. We launched into Singapore this year and we opened at Changi International Airport very recently, two to three weeks ago. We opened in Changi because it gets a lot of traffic and travellers going somewhere in transit, not necessarily staying in Singapore. So we’ve been encouraging them to sign up to our loyalty club by gifting them with an incentive. Basically we’ve got over 1000 loyalty members in Singapore since our brand launch in March. We also partnered with Her world magazine from Singapore as part of that objective.
Cotton On: We did have an advertising campaign when we launched in Hong Kong. We partnered with a Hong Kong lifestyle magazine. We got a whole package: we advertised in the magazine and had that tie-back with banners on the website. Their statistics on the demographic of that site were perfect for our Cotton On customers. For the launch of our brand in Hong Kong, we really needed to invest in advertising because we needed to be in front of more people.
JeansWest: We do both PR and advertising. We’ve done quite a few advertorials in the past: if it’s a natural partnership, it can be fantastic and can strengthen a brand’s perception to the desired audience. It’s important the partnership is aligned to the brand though, it needs to fit, make sense. Because an advertorial is a joint project it’s important you trust the partner you’re working with to deliver your objectives. We ran advertorials during autumn ’10 with Marie Claire and Grazia.
Witchery: It really depends on what objective you want to achieve, whether you want to take an above the line or below the line approach. We did a campaign with Pacific Magazines which exceeded all of our expectations. Our main objective was to encourage more customer traffic into our stores. Again our concept was all about ‘the journey’, so we printed thousands of boarding passes across Marie Claire, InStyle, those kinds of magazines. Each boarding pass had a minimum of $20 value; some had $50, $100, $200, $500 or $1000. The only way you could discover the value of the pass was to take it into the store to be scanned when you spent over $40. We came up with the concept and Pacific supported us with a whole campaign. We had a TV campaign with Lifestyle You, which is affiliated with Pacific. In terms of the success, we know the number of customers which came in with a boarding pass, we have bionic counters in our stores which monitor the number of customers that come in to our stores. The campaign is still going and it’s well and truly exceeded our expectations.
JAG: JAG utilises magazines as one of it main mediums. Our target market are still strong magazine consumers. We tend to work within the women’s fashion titles plus some of the Sunday magazines. The last couple of seasons we have supported Top Gear, Mens Health and Mens Style which broadens our male customer base – each of those mags talking to a different male mindset. Mags have worked well for the brand and have allowed JAG to send a consistent message through this medium and we have been lucky to have had support from the editors as well as a strong in house PR push. Outdoor has also been in our repertoire , supporting not only our concept stores but our wholesale business. We also believe our windows in our stores as being a strong media asset for JAG and a lot of thought goes into treating these as marketing vehicles and promoting the brand as well as its product.
Ragtrader: Is it difficult to keep updating the website with new items? A major chain retailer launched online recently and extended a one-week shoot to eight.
Witchery: We’ve got it down to a fine art now, shooting new-season product for the website - we can do it in a one-week window.
TS14+: An online store can also take up lots of time. We shoot on a weekly basis, because we have new product arriving in store every week. The styles that are arriving in store on Wednesday are available online on Friday. So already we have customers coming into our stores over the weekend asking for that particular style she saw on the website. So we know that our customers are researching their options online and it’s important we keep the website current. In addition to this, we also shoot seven catalogues a year. Another feature of our new website allows us to manage our inventory between physical stores and our online store very easily. If something is ordered from our website, it will get taken out of the inventory system.
Sportsgirl: We have lots of different people managing our website: we have a digital agency, we also go through [online publication] Pedestrian, through which we have a copywriter. We have two girls that work for us on our e-tail store. We also have an agency that’s shooting the product for the e-tail store and an online manager to oversee it all. They meet quite regularly and come together every Monday to discuss ideas. As for our product, we have so many, we don’t have all the styles for purchase online.
Ragtrader: How do you select these?
Sportsgirl: Whatever is selling best or whatever is key for the season. The designer collaborations go online as a one-week exclusive and then it goes to store a week later.
Ragtrader: Do you do any drives for loyalty club members on platforms like Facebook?
Witchery: You have to be really careful because you can’t run competitions on that site. There have been instances where people have run competitions on Facebook and nearly been shut down.
Bardot: You can do certain things to promote your brand and link it together.
Sportsgirl: Yes, we run them through our website. We do one a month and at the moment, we’ve got a competition in conjunction with STA Travel where you can win a trip around the world. Customers have to tell us in so many words or less why they want to win the trip and we all work together to decide the winner, with our online manager.
Jeanswest: We have done things like that in the past and we’ve also got a massive rewards program that has 800,000 members. Anyone who makes a purchase can choose to join and then there’s different stages of discounts and offers – there’s bronze, silver and gold. It is easy to get into the trap of turning it into a discount club: we’re careful now to bring in added value privileges and exclusives for members. We’re holding competitions that are solely for our rewards members: they receive special invitations to events, family and friends offers, birthday vouchers. Gold members have just received a personalised card from our CEO to launch the season.
Ragtrader: Are they responsive to loyalty club alerts and offers?
Jeanswest: They’re incredibly loyal. We send out an email and you can tell they’ve got into store and purchased that item. The stats are there. We’ve got a really skinny cargo at the moment and we thought that it would be really popular with 16-year-olds, 18-year-olds. We’ve got 40-year-old rewards members buying them. It’s interesting to see. When they’re making the purchase, their details are on that card so we can see what they’re purchasing, what size they’re purchasing, what styles are the most popular. We can take that back to our product teams for next season.
Ragtrader: Are all of them online?
Jeansweat: We don’t have all of the 800,000 email addresses, but we probably have around 400,000 of those and email out with every new window campaign. We can track who and when they’re opening it, purchasing from it and really drill down into the data to better understand our customers’ wants for future communication. We also use SMS alerts which work brilliantly for store relocations and openings. We let them know when it’s closing and where their closest store is to shop until it reopens. We target relevant postcodes with our store SMSs. You’re obviously limited in the number of characters for each message, so it’s got to be concise and to the point. It could be as simple as ‘New Chadstone store now open, exclusive offer – all jeans $65 for a limited time, see you in store’, for instance.
JAG: Loyalty members are great for this – we’ve got 1.7 million across Colorado Group and 200,000 of those are within JAG. So when we launch our online store, we can really hit the ground running.
Meet the panel
Emily Checinski – Cotton On
Cotton On is a Melbourne-headquartered powerhouse, with over 600 stores and 4500 employees. Launched in 1991, its original basics offer has since expanded into intimates, sleepwear and active wear with Cotton Body; childrenswear with Cotton On Kids; footwear with Rubi Shoes; and gifts and stationery with Typo. It has sites across Australia, New Zealand, Asia and the US.
Georgia Trevarthen – Witchery
When Witchery was acquired by Gresham Private Equity in 2006, it had a network of over 70 stores, concessions in David Jones and clearance centres. This year it expanded into the Singaporean market with a stand-alone accessories store and Witchery site at the international Changi Airport.
Fiona Cameron – JAG
Launched in 1972 by Adele and Rob Palmer, JAG has undergone several restructures since its inception. It reinvented denim during the ‘70s; garnered a loyal celebrity following in the ‘80s with Steve McQueen, Bianca Jagger and Jackie Onassis; and now produces lifestyle apparel under the Colorado Group, which acquired the brand in March 2001.
Kate Evans – Sportsgirl
Sportsgirl is owned and operated by the Sussan Retail Group in Melbourne. Last year was a busy one for the brand, with the unveiling of its first ever SG branded stand-alone accessory stores at Melbourne Airport’s Virgin terminal and QVB in Sydney. It also launched a “super-flagship” at Chadstone Centre in Melbourne, designed by UK’s HMKM and featuring 12 dedicated fashion zones.
MELAnie Schwarz – TS14+
TS14+ opened its 100th store with a bang this year, launching a flagship site at the newly redeveloped Mid City Centre in Sydney. The plus-size label also commemorated 25 years in the business by branching out into the New Zealand market with a string of boutiques. Formerly known as Taking Shape, TS14+ is also distributed through Myer.
Sarah Morgan – Bardot
Launched in 1996 by designer Carol Skoufis, Bardot began as a small shop in Melbourne’s Bridge Road. Today it has close to 40 Bardot stores, plus-size womenswear label Monroe, menswear brand James Marlon and kidswear favourite Bardot Junior. It is stocked at Myer stores nationally, and is sold in selected boutiques around the world.
Belinda Waller – Jeanswest
The first Jeanswest store was opened by Alister Norwood in Perth in 1972. It sold staple jeans and clothing from Australian wholesalers. Now a subsidiary of Glorious Sun enterprises, Jeanswest operates over 2200 stores across Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East and China. Denim is an integral part of its business, with casualwear items and accessories completing its product offer.