Innovation and Creativity at Scale for Brands and Retailers

Consumer expectations of brands are rising. In the era of exponentially disruptive digital change, consumers expect to be able to engage with a brand on their own terms across multiple channels at any time. Technology has handed customers unprecedented power, not only to dictate the rules in purchasing goods and services, but the rules of engagement.

It’s a critical time for brands: every week there’s news of the next casualty falling into administration. But it’s not all doom and gloom- instead the industry is seeing a divide between brave, innovative brands reimagining the way in which they engage with consumers and those who haven’t risen to the challenge. What should brands do to win in a new world where authenticity and purpose rule?

Major digital trends such as AI, Voice, Augmented Reality and 5G are generating new opportunities for brands to connect to their customers. Every company leader is aware that to succeed, innovation must be at the core of their business. But how do you do this at scale, maintaining creativity in today’s cost pressured quarter-by-quarter environment? How do you lean into the opportunity to surprise and delight your customer without suffering from ‘shiny object syndrome’ or taking your eye off the numbers?

In this whitepaper we explore the art of data-driven customer centricity, creative storytelling and the role of technology in connecting to your customers and future proofing your brand. We’ll explore what the leaders are doing with case studies, and inspire you to elevate yourself above the day’s trading and be brave for the next chapter.

Understand what consumers want, and give it to them

Marketers nowadays face huge challenges in trying to break through with meaningful creative on digital and social channels. Ad blindness is at an all-time high, and audiences have grown up with increasingly high expectations for authenticity that speaks to them and captures their attention across various channels. But having the ability to reach out and touch customers in this way depends on inspiring insight, rooted in complex data. You have to really understand your customer to connect to them meaningfully.

Begin with generating customer insight. Generally speaking, a “customer insight” is any observed, deduced, or forecasted metric that describes a customer’s behavior. However, what makes an insight relevant — and, by extension, valuable — is the degree to which it can be used to inform a brand’s real-world marketing decisions. When you use data (both 1st and 2nd party) to drive insights, you can find some really interesting things out about your customers- that might just change the message you want to tell.

“At the heart of an effective creative philosophy is the belief that nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though his language so often can camouflage what really motivates him.”

William Bernbach, the U.S. insights pioneer and a major figure behind the Creative Revolution of the 60’s.

Without being turned into relevant, actionable customer insight, data is just that- data. Analysis of the data and spotting trends, patterns and recurrences can drive incredible marketing. Take, for example, Three’s award-winning ‘Holiday spam’ campaign, driven by the insight that people love to show off, and that when roaming charges are removed the extra data allowance is used primarily to take holiday selfies. In Fashion and Sportswear, Nike saw incredible success by understanding that their primary target audience isn’t athletes, but regular people who aspire to be athletes. This led to their ‘Find your greatness’ campaign, turning the insight into delighting their customers.

Look for a variety of sources for this insight- you can work directly with your advertising agency, but also look to your chat transcripts, operational data and real-time web analytics such as heat mapping. You can incentive potential and existing customers via social media surveys.

Tell your story

Once you’ve developed meaningful, actionable insights about your target market, it’s time to connect your brand message and purpose authentically. Sometimes this results in internal work to realign around your core brand values and how this connects to your customer’s needs and wants.

When customer insight is aligned to brand goals, incredible marketing campaigns can form. A study conducted by Activia and research partner GlobalWebIndex revealed that 80% of women in the U.S. aged between twenty five and fifty five agree that they’re their own worst critic. In response to this, Activia launched it’s rebrand from function to emotion with ‘It Starts Inside’. The work was designed to spark conversations and encourage women to achieve their full potential, inspiring them to rise above their ‘inner critic’.

The campaign features candid interviews with real women talking about their experiences with self-doubt as well as their strength and determination to achieve their goals. The “Don’t Tell Me I Can’t” video is an ideal example of audience-centric marketing at work, where people are at the core of the brand’s message.

Appealing to viewers’ emotions in an effort to build radical empathy and shift perceptions of Activia as more than a mere product, but as “a product and platform to help women feel good inside and out”, it proves the power of insights that inspire.

Consumer trends are powerful because they reveal opportunities to take over whole industries and amass new consumers. However, innovation is often a step further than what consumers say they want. The same way people couldn’t envision that they wanted an iPhone. Steve Jobs was often quoted for what Forbes called a dangerous lesson:

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

The technological revolution has far evolved beyond focus groups- we can get real time indicators via first and second-party data of what customers’ current behaviour, as well as using tools like social listening. However, digging for these insights takes a level of bravery and innovation to step outside the norm. Once you’ve taken the steps to gather these insights, you can really see beyond the quarter and start to get creative with how you tell your brand story.

Get Creative

In the digital, data driven age, it’s sometimes difficult to retain creativity. To do things just because it’s the right thing to do and to test the boundaries of these consumer insights. To cut through the noise and overload, you need to think about how you can elevate your story, differentiate your brand and connect with customers on an emotional level.

There are some great examples of brands doing incredibly creative things.

As covered by eConsultancy, Ted Baker’s S/S ’17 campaign saw them create an eight part sitcom, ‘Keeping up with the Bakers’ that they played out periodically over Instagram, alongside daily challenges and 360 degree shoppable film around the fictional home. This was combined with an in-store experience. Ted Baker created interactive store windows, enabling passers-by to spy into the Bakers’ living room. Placing their hands on the glass triggers a camera that puts the user within the window itself and takes a photo of them as one of the characters.

As Communication Director Craig Smith told The Drum, Ted Baker avoids defaulting to headline endorsements or influencers, which enables them to take a different approach to their brand.

To maintain creativity, Ted Baker takes a holistic “season on season narrative”, that takes a completely different feel each time and gives the brand more freedom creatively. “It means we don’t have to play that game. We don’t want to pigeonhole our brand with this is the celebrity for this season or the photographic maestro for this season we like the fact that it is all about Ted and from Ted,” added Smith.

Chanel has also been at the forefront of creative storytelling. Laser focus on their brand and then creative freedom has resulted in them digitally rendering all of their products in advance of the 5G revolution, and creating a microsite, ‘Inside Chanel’, dedicated to telling the story of the brand. Unlike Ted Baker, they do work with influencers, and famously follow an aloof social media strategy of not following anybody back, to maintain the exclusive feel of the brand. Repeatedly heralded as the most influential luxury brand on social media, this strategy of exclusivity, choosiness with influencers and doubling down on video has seen Chanel reap the benefits. The mixing of online and offline experiences has been nicely done, too, with pop up stores and experiences in Cannes, Paris and Capri- based on audience insight.

Mixing and matching channels to tell the brand story in creative ways forms a great way for brands to differentiate. But how can you do this practically? There are lots of different ways to be creative.

Working with an external agency is one, but also, It may sound obvious, but enabling your team to share ideas and making sure everyone’s opinions are heard is critical. Seek to create an evolving team dialogue and encourage regular brainstorms. You could take inspiration from fashion brand N Brown, which has made togetherness one of its core company values.

Encourage your team to work flexibly, and your C-Suite to take time out. A study led by psychologist Scott Kaufman found our best ideas often come when we’re well away from the office. This is where your ad agency can really help, organizing brand values and creativity sessions.

Take the lead from Asos, John Lewis and Innocent drinks in encouraging employees to pursue their ideas- at Innocent, they have a view of ‘just go with it’ on employee ideas, resulting in the launch of their veg pot business, now worth over £30 million.

Be Brave with Technology

Technology trends, such as AI and 5G, should not be done for technology’s sake. This results in gimmicky marketing, and is not future proof. Good technology usage should be a combination of what reaps great ROI now, and what can be supercharged as we move to the future.

Take Audi, for example. Audi is investing in virtual reality in order to future proof themselves. Hedging their bets that driverless cars will take off, Audi know they will be competing not by which car drives better, but by which can provide the greatest in-car entertainment experience for people to connect with their families. But in the present moment when driverless vehicles haven’t taken off, they capitalise on this investment by realising that people like technology, they want to hear the story of a technologically savvy car and visit VR dealerships.

Brands and retailers are scaling creativity by giving out experiences, and capitalising on the surprise and delight of technological advance. The popularity of Twitch shows that people don’t need to be having the experience, merely watching the experience can be enough. Brands providing technology experiences such as Alibaba’s monumental Single’s Day shopping event and Bonmarche’s Paris AR experience can provide things like ‘the making of’ videos and distributing the experience further- which can reap rewards now.

The next generation of shoppers is 3D ready and virtual reality immersed. Hanging out with their friends on Fortnite, children are really invested in their avatars. How do brands capitalise on this opportunity- from dressing the avatars to taking advantage of in-VR advertising? Brands need to invest some money now, so that as these technologies explode more and more they are ready. In the meantime, it can be used as part of your eCommerce platform, and to create a buzz around the technological credentials of your brand.

5G unlocks the ability to render 3D objects at scale. What once took months at an offsite processor can be rendered in seconds to audiences easily and quickly. This will revolutionise eCommerce- not because it’s more convenient, but because it’s better. To capitalise on this generation of 5G shoppers it’s good to get customers used to seeing 3D images of clothing via advertising.

Summary/ Conclusion

In conclusion, brands need to be brave- but there’s a way of minimising the risk and being creative at scale. Start by putting your customer at the heart of everything. Use your data to really understand them, and help you serve their needs and anticipate the future. Next, find actionable insights. Use 1st and 2nd party data (or even 3rd party like social listening) to find patterns, affiliate interests and surprising details about your target audience.

Use that insight to get creative. Are your target audience aware of your differentiator? Is there an unusual problem you can solve? How can you tell your brand story best, via different channels, different aspects of the story and different mediums.

Elevate your story with technology. You can use advertising to make an investment now, which will put you ahead of your competition in the future.

And finally, think of your distribution strategy. Work with your advertising agency to be where your customers are with a differentiated approach for each channel to provide maximum engagement.

Following these steps will elevate you above the quarter-by-quarter pressure of B2C companies to think more strategically about staying relevant to your consumers long term. Work with a trusted partner who is a storyteller first and foremost to help you understand your insights and stay true to your brand, drive start to finish campaign production and then use technology to elevate you above ad-blindness and get your message heard.

Sources:

1. Nike ‘Find your greatness’ campaign: https://advsoc2013.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/nike-2012-find-your-greatness/
2. Activia shift their brand positioning: http://marketingmag.ca/brands/activia-brand-positioning-shifts-from-function-to-emotion-183672/
3. Activia campaign video: https://vimeo.com/219122224
4. Ted Baker’s ‘Keeping up with the Bakers’ campaign: https://econsultancy.com/fashion-marketing-campaigns/
5. Ted Baker talks to the drum about brand strategy https://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/03/15/ted-baker-talks-creative-freedom-it-launches-keeping-up-with-the-bakers-sitcom
6. Chanel is the most influential luxury brand on social: https://econsultancy.com/why-chanel-is-the-most-influential-luxury-brand-on-social/
7. N Brown, ‘Togetherness is crucial’ http://nbrowncareers.co.uk/gusto/togetherness-is-crucial/
8. Innovation away from the office https://www.businessinsider.com/why-people-get-their-best-ideas-in-the-shower-2016-1?r=US&IR=T
9. Innocent Drink’s approach to employee engagement https://engageforsuccess.org/case-study-employee-innovation-at-innocent
10. Audi invest in Virtual Reality https://www.roadtovr.com/audi-has-deployed-1000-vr-showrooms-in-dealerships-worldwide/
11. The popularity of Twitch https://www.referralcandy.com/blog/twitch-marketing-strategy/
12. Alibaba’s ‘Singles Day’ mayhem https://fortune.com/2018/11/09/alibaba-singles-day-china/
13. Immersive technology in retail https://marketingland.com/heres-how-brand-marketers-can-use-immersive-technology-to-build-an-effective-retail-experience-260301
14. Virtual reality styling https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/02/3d-virtual-styling-style-me.html