A perspective on retail brands
It was never part of my plan, but thanks to some good fortune, I have worked on a lot of retail brands throughout my career: Tesco, Shell Select, The Post Office, 3Mobile, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Eddie Bauer, Macy’s and, most recently, Kroger.
I find retail brands fascinating on multiple levels:
- They are often large and complicated businesses, with multiple business units clamoring for marketing dollars.
- The experience drives brand meaning more than any paid for communications ever will, and so it is critically important to create change from the inside out and engage employees.
- More than any other category I have worked in, there is a need to drive sales today, whilst also maintaining an eye on the longer-term health of the brand. As such, there are often multiple communications jobs to be done.
- These brands have intimate customer relationships, and they have a vast amount of data to drive personalization at scale.
- Retailers are often highly innovative and are quick to develop new initiatives based on changing customer needs. The news quotient on a retailer often dwarfs that of CPG brands.
- They play a big role in the emotionally charged moments in our lives, like the holidays, and this gives rise to interesting marketing and communications opportunities.
As I reflect on the work I have done with retailers, here are a few of the key lessons I have learned:
1. It is important to take a position, rather than necessarily adopt a positioning.
The best retail brands take a position in the market about a salient issue. They have a point-of-view that drives their actions and how they show up in the world. For example, Tesco’s position was that grocery shopping was a weekly chore that most people disliked, and this informed their proposition. “No one tries harder to make shopping a little easier for our customers”.
Another example would be AT&T. The position they took was that wireless was unnecessarily complicated and it was their role to help make sense of it for customers. This led to “It’s not complicated” and gave rise to Lilly, the super helpful, down-to-earth salesperson.
I always liked the position that Macy’s adopted when they repositioned themselves after the pandemic. Their view was that fashion is what customers buy, but style is what the customer owns. Their role in the world was to be the place where customers were able to realize their personal style. This was about offering not only amazing brands, of which they had many, but it also meant they had to provide their customers with help and advice. In many respects, it was the latter which would be their shield against the likes of Amazon and the fast turn fashion retailers.
The advantage of taking a position is that gives the business the flexibility to pull the various levers that drive behaviors. For Tesco, they could talk about price, quality and service initiatives under “no one tries harder for customers:” Equally, AT&T could talk about network performance, new plans and their approach to promotions (e.g., we treat new customers and loyal customers the same) under “it’s not complicated”. For Macy’s, they could talk about the latest fashion trends and how you could make them your own and, just as easily, their competitive prices that made owning your style with the latest trends affordable
2. Having a distinctive tone of voice is disproportionately important.
Being clear about your tone of voice is particularly important for retail brands as it helps bring coherence to the vast array of messages they often must deliver. On Tesco, we defined our voice as humble, which was highly distinctive versus the brands in the category and within the broader marketplace. How many brands are truly humble? Sadly, most err on the side of hyperbole and over-statement.
Defining a distinctive tone of voice isn’t easy. Over the years, I have seen “welcoming”, “friendly”, “accessible” etc. on way too many briefs. Those sorts of adjectives just aren’t that helpful to the creative teams. Compare that to “magical and whimsical” for Macy’s which open up an array of interesting creative opportunities.
To unearth those richer and more distinctive voices, it is often worth thinking about brand archetypes and your brand’s role in the world.
3. Managing a complex ecosystem of communications tasks
In order to help drive growth on a retailer, there are a lot of jobs for communications to fulfill - keeping primary shoppers loyal and getting them to buy more from you, disrupting the preference of secondary shoppers (who are more loyal to another retailer) and responding to local competitive changes to name only three.
Consequently, it is important to be clear on the task in hand and liberate communications to fulfill each objective. For example, on Tesco, we used to think about our communications tasks on three dimensions: “Why Tesco”, which was about reinforcing brand affinity and consideration amongst primary shoppers; “Why Tesco now” which was about disrupting the preference of secondary shoppers and, finally, “Why Tesco here” which was about local relevance. It was a useful framework that helped bring order to our messaging and campaign management.
4. The body language of the business is critical.
Put in common parlance, “actions speak louder than words”. The instore experience and how your employees treat customers, can change perceptions faster than any piece of advertising. So, it is important that your brand idea harnesses and fuels behaviors from the inside out.
Tesco did this masterfully with the launch of “Every Little Helps”, which was accompanied by over 100 service initiatives that demonstrated their commitment to make shopping easier for customers. Everything from opening another checkout if there was ever more than one person in front of you in the queue, to removing candies from the checkout (and temptation within arm’s reach for kids), to free diapers in the changing rooms.
5. The parable of the 1/2 price chicken…………
When you work with a retailer, you are constantly under pressure to deliver like-for-like sales improvement on a weekly basis. That inevitably means you’ll be handling a lot of promotional work, be that half price chickens, $30 unlimited plans, $200 iPhones or Valentine’s Day gifts for under $50!
For many years, I worked with a brilliant creative leader who used to say that, when the ½ price chicken brief landed, we needed to get out of the way and not overcomplicate it. We’d have to show a chicken, say half price in the headline artfully and make sure we leveraged our brand colors and logo (in other words, make sure it is well branded as every supermarket sells chickens.
6. It’s personal (or its irrelevant).
Few things are more personal than shopping. Where we shop, how we shop and what we buy are as unique as our fingerprints and so we should strive for our communications to be equally personal. Tesco, nearly 20 years ago, were incredibly proud of the fact that when they sent out their quarterly Club Card mailings, no two shoppers got the same letter or offers. That was remarkable at the time, and they identified it as a key driver of their success.
With AI, we will be able to deliver personalization at scale like never before. Just think what this would mean for recipe campaigns that have always been a stalwart of grocery retailers. AI will be able to recommend recipes based on personal tastes, food trends, commodity prices and even regional/local preferences.
7. Make the big moments momentous and memorable.
In the UK, where I spent the formative years of my career, Christmas is the time of year when advertisers would gift us with emotionally charged stories to get us to spend our hard-earned money with them. John Lewis was the poster child of this for many years, but the likes of Sainsbury, M&S, Tesco and even brands like Argos got into the act.
The work always seemed to be written to one of two familiar briefs:
- Use our range of products to show that we are the destination for all your Christmas needs (Tesco and M&S)
- Demonstrate how we are the ideal destination for all your gifts as we have the most thoughtful and personal gifts (John Lewis, Argos)
There was often very little insight in the briefs, so the hard work of creating something magical and memorable that cut through the clutter often fell to the creative department. Not an easy brief in truth.
For Tesco, we created the Dotty commercial that spoofed the James Bond movies, which always run on the afternoon of Christmas Day. It starred Roger Moore and Dotty skiing down an Alpine Mountain and culminated in a bit of fireside romance and the unforgettable line, “Oooh Roger”. It promoted the breadth of Tesco’s non-food range and garnered a lot of positive sentiment from customers and drove a lot of business.
It has always surprised me that holiday work in the US has never quite hit the high notes of UK Christmas advertising. So, it has always been an ambition of mine to deliver interesting and emotionally charged work for the holidays for my clients.
One year, we managed to convince AT&T to make the film about a daughter who gifts her father her phone, so she is uncharacteristically present for the holidays (the gift of being present). It was a great insight that I think we executed beautifully.
My two holiday high points have come on Macy’s with two very different campaigns. The first, “Walking in Dad’s shoes” was created mid pandemic and was a magical and whimsical story about the journey a little girl goes on in her father’s shoe, which reveals all the wonderful things he does for the family. It is a journey through his daily life, which ends up inspiring an incredibly thoughtful gift. It was very much in the spirit of John Lewis, but the execution could have been better.
Insert “Walking in dad’s shoes” here.
The other holiday campaign I am proud of was inspired by the Macy’s client who wanted to introduce a new character at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. The character was a young reindeer called TipToe. We were given beautiful designs of the character and then set to work.
The story we created was about how TipToe’s fear of flying was overcome by the support and ingenuity of his friends. The story we created was then carried through to Macy’s Holiday windows and throughout the store. TipToe was our Penguin (for John Lewis fans), but sadly supply chain issues limited the number of TipToes we could make and sell. Nevertheless, it was a beautiful, heart-warming film.
It will be exciting to see the new holiday work start to appear in the next month or so.
I have loved my time working on retail brands. The pace of retail demands actionable thinking that can be turned into brilliant work, quickly. In many respects, it is one of the purest forms of advertising. Make people like my brand and make sure you are selling more product than we did last week!