How to breathe new life into your brand experience
Refreshing your brand experience can be an expensive business, often with little focus on tangible benefits. However if you get it right, it can have a massive impact on your business’s performance and provide a platform to extend your offer.
We’ve been working with Australian Geographic Retail for nearly 3 years now and based on our strategic direction, they’ve built a brand and experience that their customers know and love and that helps them stand out from the crowd.
Australian Geographic Retail is a rare case of a retailer that has continued to grow, both in revenue and in size despite tough conditions. Based on core principles of a well-managed business, a clear, focussed brand strategy and a unique product offering, they saw record sales over Christmas 2011.
We love them because they’ve done so much with minimal marketing spend (which we’ve helped them with of course) and that they have a focus on fun, engaging and effective creative, rather than discounting to drive revenue (they have two sales a year, but never before Christmas). Australian Geographic Retail has tight budgets, but what it does have, it leverages, by focussing on what gets results.
We were initially engaged to reinvigorate their brand and retail communication, which had fallen short of reflecting the great product range and customer service. We extended this work to recommend an ongoing strategic marketing approach.
Our recommendation has been to employ three basic tactics, widespread catalogue distribution, shopping mall out of home advertising, plus powerful, engaging and above all, fun window displays.
They’ve been really effective in using these traditional channels to drive customers into store, along with cross marketing with the Australian Geographic Journal membership.
In the last 14 months or so, we helped them extend that activity online, in what could be a textbook example of getting the basics right in adding an e-commerce channel.
We focussed on providing a great user experience on the site, aligning the look and feel with their overall brand and campaign activity. They also spent a great deal of time working with us to get the back-end of the e-commerce business working effectively – something that businesses often neglect. We know, that if you can’t fulfil orders, or provide great customer service, then your reputation will be shot, which impacts the wider brand, as well as the e-commerce channel.
Focussing on getting the business and experience right meant that when they ramped up the promotion, through EDMs, SEO, SEM and integrating with their offline activity, their conversion rates became incredibly high.
In what’s a great example of a simple integrated campaign, this Christmas saw their e-shop receive roughly 10 times the amount of the traffic compared to the same period the previous year, driven by both offline and online activity. In turn, store traffic increased, as customers used the site to browse the product range and research store locations.
It all resulted in a bumper sales result – producing a 500% increase on 2010 e-shop results and all because they got the basics right first, allowed us to give them the strategic and tactical direction to get the most of their budgets and focussed on their unique brand position in Australian retail.