Con­sumers today con­duct a great deal of research about the prod­ucts they are buy­ing and brands are being asked to ful­fill a mul­ti­tude of infor­ma­tion­al needs. Argos, a UK-based con­sumer goods and ecom­merce retail­er, is excep­tion­al in that they main­tain an active pres­ence oper­at­ing across a large range of touch­points, both dig­i­tal­ly and via tra­di­tion­al media. This case study takes a close look at how Argos reach­es, influ­ences, and engages con­sumers as they go through their pur­chase jour­neys.

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Introduction: How brands are making the most of every moment

At times, momen­tol­ogy – the study of con­sumers and the dig­i­tal media they use and engage with through­out the pur­chase fun­nel – can be beau­ti­ful­ly sim­ple. Momen­tol­ogy, at its essence, means embrac­ing change, striv­ing to become more con­sumer-cen­tric, and deliv­er­ing bet­ter, eas­i­er expe­ri­ences for con­sumers through­out the entire online pur­chase jour­ney.

Momen­tol­ogy can also be quite com­plex. To real­ly per­form as a brand, there needs to be an under­stand­ing that no one cam­paign can tru­ly impact results, or covert con­sumers in indi­vid­ual light­bulb moments (at least at scale).

Instead, cam­paigns help to influ­ence con­sumers, nudg­ing them along the pur­chase fun­nel in a series of coor­di­nat­ed moments that even­tu­al­ly con­verge to form a com­plete cus­tomer jour­ney.

Suc­cess requires brands to come across per­sua­sive and vis­i­ble at touch­points that span the entire user jour­ney, guid­ing con­sumers through chan­nels and mul­ti­ple inter­ac­tions to form a sin­gle inter­con­nect­ed expe­ri­ence. Fail­ing to ful­fill an impor­tant touch­point or to ser­vice a par­tic­u­lar need, can result in a dis­con­nect, and poten­tial­ly a lost cus­tomer.

So to real­ly excel, brands need to prac­tice inte­grat­ed mar­ket­ing, and have cross-chan­nel col­lab­o­ra­tion between teams in place in order to pro­vide the lev­el of con­sis­ten­cy that con­sumers have come to expect. Ulti­mate­ly, rev­enues gained will be a con­se­quence of the sum of a brand’s equi­ty across a range of the touch­points they are able to ful­fill.

Argos is a great exam­ple of a brand that deliv­ers cus­tomer-cen­tric moments through­out the pur­chase jour­ney. This Argos case study will exam­ine what a typ­i­cal jour­ney might look like, from the moment a con­sumer may encounter a brand or prod­uct, right through the site design, con­tent, and con­ver­sion rate opti­miza­tions that brands employ to max­i­mize busi­ness rev­enues.

Brand Profile: Argos

• UK ecom­merce and high-street retail.
• Stocks a com­pre­hen­sive range of con­sumer goods.
• One of the brand’s main strengths is their endur­ing pres­ence – it’s esti­mat­ed that 96 per­cent of the UK pop­u­la­tion is with­in 10 miles of an Argos store, and the brand has con­tin­ued this com­mit­ment with their dig­i­tal strat­e­gy, main­tain­ing strong vis­i­bil­i­ty online.
• Recent­ly invest­ed heav­i­ly in dig­i­tal strat­e­gy and rebrand­ing, affirm­ing their place as an unlike­ly leader in speed and ease of ser­vice, with inno­va­tions in Click-and-Col­lect and Fast­Track ser­vices, as well as their new con­cept stores mean­ing they have been set­ting the pace in dig­i­tal ser­vice deliv­ery expe­ri­ences.
• Com­peti­tors: Ama­zon, Cur­rys / PCWorld, John Lewis, Tesco, Hal­fords, Toys R’ Us

Argos’ oper­a­tions span from offline adver­tis­ing media such as TV and print, to grow­ing dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tives includ­ing organ­ic search, paid search, social media, and PR.

The Argos Customer Journey

Where Argos is a British brand, for this case study we’ll look at the most typ­i­cal of British needs. A prod­uct every house­hold like­ly has and no British per­son should live with­out. After all, you can’t make a cup of tea with­out a ket­tle.

Tra­di­tion­al­ly, one of Argos’ strongest val­ue propo­si­tions has been in home appli­ances, and the abil­i­ty to pick up the prod­uct from a high-street store rather than wait­ing in for a deliv­ery bodes well for the brand.

How well does Argos pro­vide for dig­i­tal cus­tomers in search of a ket­tle?

Be Considered

The typ­i­cal con­sumer jour­ney today starts at the search engine. For many rea­sons it has become the go-to por­tal for any prod­uct con­sumers want to research. A con­sumer might be look­ing for a new ket­tle after their cur­rent appli­ance devel­oped a fault, and they might be look­ing for a mod­el with a rep­u­ta­tion for reli­a­bil­i­ty (and at a com­pet­i­tive price too).

Let’s see how Argos checks out in the search engine results.

Organic Search

What a result! Top of the organ­ic results, Argos do excep­tion­al­ly well for the typ­i­cal keyphrase “buy ket­tle”.

There is how­ev­er, plen­ty of com­pe­ti­tion from a selec­tion of oth­er big hit­ting ecom­merce retail­ers (e.g., Currys/PC World, Tesco and John Lewis), how­ev­er some of these have had to resort to paid ads to retain strong vis­i­bil­i­ty on Google’s first page.

A quick check of the mobile search results yields sim­i­lar­ly great results:

Paid Search

Let’s look a bit clos­er at the inter­ac­tion between organ­ic search and paid adver­tis­ing.

For Argos, a suc­cess­ful keyphrase such as this one demands less of an empha­sis on paid adver­tis­ing:

Argos’ paid list­ing for the key­word doesn’t show up until more than halfway down the page (and below the fold). It shows that a PPC spend is there, but at a low­er pri­or­i­ty.

Aggregated Search & Price Comparison

For price con­scious con­sumers who may be look­ing for the best val­ue, com­pet­i­tive pric­ing in the Google shop­ping results ensures they main­tain a pres­ence in the price com­par­i­son pages.

In the fol­low­ing two exam­ples, Argos doesn’t pos­sess the fea­ture list­ing, but they have man­aged to match the price of the fea­tured retail­er, which at least ensures they are in the mix as con­sumers con­sid­er which retail­er to buy from:

Lower Ranking Keywords

Before we move on, let’s see how Argos tack­les a prod­uct key­word that per­forms slight­ly less well in the organ­ic search results.

For the key­words “children’s bikes”, Argos faces tough organ­ic com­pe­ti­tion from Hal­fords (those who live in the UK will know that bicy­cles are very much Hal­fords’ niche).

In order to remain vis­i­ble for this niche, Argos put greater invest­ment into Prod­uct List­ing Ads (PLAs) and PPC adver­tis­ing, ensur­ing they give their com­pe­ti­tion a run for their mon­ey.

The prod­uct list­ing ads espe­cial­ly gives the brand’s vis­i­bil­i­ty a valu­able boost, and help make up for the fact that they face con­sid­er­able oppo­si­tion from Hal­fords in the num­ber one posi­tion organ­ic search result, as does the above fold PPC posi­tion.

The Google Shop­ping price infor­ma­tion pro­vides con­sumers with a quick indi­ca­tion of com­pet­i­tive­ness, and (in a sin­gle moment) we’re into the sec­ond stage of the con­sumer jour­ney.

Ver­dict: Over­all, with the excep­tion­al organ­ic result for key prod­uct lines con­sid­ered, the brand exhibits great pres­ence at this ear­ly con­sid­er­a­tion touch­point, bal­anc­ing bud­gets to remain com­pet­i­tive across a range of prod­ucts and cat­e­gories.

Be Evaluated

Back to ket­tles. With Argos’ vis­i­bil­i­ty putting them well in the mix, let’s take a look at how the brand looks to per­suade con­sumers as they are eval­u­at­ing their pur­chase options.

Site Design & Experience

The search results show that Argos have ded­i­cat­ed category/landing pages set up for par­tic­u­lar prod­ucts (a quick look shows that the strat­e­gy is scaled across the site for many key prod­uct cat­e­gories).

The Argos site has a large selec­tion of avail­able prod­ucts, and the top of the page includes prod­uct rec­om­men­da­tions that seem to be based on the strength of pos­i­tive user-gen­er­at­ed reviews.

Prod­uct pages them­selves have a good selec­tion of high qual­i­ty images and video to sup­port writ­ten infor­ma­tion­al con­tent:

Videos are pro­duced exclu­sive­ly for Argos, and cov­er prod­uct fea­tures and infor­ma­tion­al con­tent. Many con­sumers swear by video reviews, and with the major­i­ty prod­uct list­ings on ecom­merce sites fea­tur­ing images only, going the extra mile ful­fills an addi­tion­al touch­point that could end up mak­ing the dif­fer­ence.

Mobile

For users who made their way onto the site via a mobile device, the brows­er expe­ri­ence is speedy and excep­tion­al­ly opti­mized:

Note the “mobile-friend­ly” top nav – mean­ing the site almost looks like a ded­i­cat­ed app.

All the infor­ma­tion and con­tent avail­able on the desk­top site is also avail­able on the mobile site.

Nav­i­ga­tion through and around pages is intu­itive and lag free. Dou­ble-tap enlarges images and swip­ing around moves the enlarged image around.

User-Generated Reviews

On both the mobile and desk­top sites, the avail­abil­i­ty of user reviews is giv­en a promi­nent posi­tion, right next to the price, which is an indi­ca­tion of just how impor­tant reviews have become for con­sumers eval­u­at­ing their pur­chas­es.

As you would expect, the rec­om­mend­ed prod­uct is extreme­ly well reviewed.

Search Ecosystem

How­ev­er, some­times con­sumers want to see more than the reviews that are present on brand sites.

After all, it only takes a few sec­onds to search Google for reviews. Con­sumers trust organ­ic search results to be an unbi­ased source of infor­ma­tion. This rep­re­sents a huge chal­lenge for brands because it’s a lot hard­er for brands to man­age per­sua­sive­ness out­side of their own domain.

How does Argos check-out for a par­tic­u­lar prod­uct review in organ­ic search results when cus­tomers return to search to eval­u­ate?

We’ve come to a cru­cial moment in the con­sumer jour­ney – and one of the rea­sons momen­tol­ogy is so impor­tant. The moment con­sumers return to search.

Using the exam­ple of Argos’ rec­om­mend­ed prod­uct, we can see that when con­sumers search for this par­tic­u­lar prod­uct, they will be met by favor­able reviews.

On pop­u­lar review site revoo.com Argos have a clever trick up their sleeve. The prod­uct appears at the top of revoo.com’s inbuilt price com­par­i­son to reas­sure con­sumers on pric­ing, but more impor­tant­ly acts as a cru­cial off-domain touch­point that reminds and recon­nects con­sumers to the Argos pur­chase jour­ney.

Across dif­fer­ent domains, hav­ing an under­stand­ing of the way con­sumers are using many facets and por­tals with­in search to eval­u­ate prod­ucts is key.

Buying Guides

Even if you win con­sumers back at this stage, their appetite for infor­ma­tion still won’t nec­es­sar­i­ly be sat­is­fied. For prod­ucts that fea­ture a wide vari­ety in range and spec­i­fi­ca­tion between dif­fer­ent mod­els, con­sumers will seek addi­tion­al con­tent so they can read up on the infor­ma­tion they need to inform their buy­ing deci­sions.

While ket­tles don’t quite need this lev­el of con­tent to sup­port, it’s worth noth­ing that Argos has a large num­ber of buy­ing guides for key con­sumer prod­ucts.

DSLR’s for exam­ple, have a link to the Argos buy­ing guide present on the cat­e­go­ry page, along­side oth­er addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion cov­er­ing deliv­ery and cur­rent dis­counts next to the prod­uct spec­i­fi­ca­tion for con­sumers who are look­ing to delve a lit­tle deep­er.

Be Purchased

For con­sumers who reach this stage of the jour­ney, Argos real­ly come into their own. The brand’s posi­tion as a high-street and lead­ing ecom­merce retail­er enables them to offer a wealth of options to con­sumers as they are look­ing to trans­act.

For exam­ple, con­sumers can check stock lev­els online, and not just those in the ware­house but whether their product(s) are avail­able in a par­tic­u­lar store.

Argos pro­vi­sion for ser­vice deliv­ery is sim­ply excel­lent, and in many ways is lead­ing the field. With Fast­Track, con­sumers can even reserve their goods for an imme­di­ate in-store col­lec­tion.

In total, con­sumers have three options to have their goods deliv­ered:

• Fast­Track: Pay online, col­lect in-store. (Hav­ing used this ser­vice recent­ly, I can report that I was in and out of the store in just 10 min­utes. Fast indeed.)
• Col­lect In Store: Reserve online, pay in-store.
• Home Deliv­ery: This is avail­able for £3.95 for any items able to be deliv­ered by 1 per­son (deliv­er­ies requir­ing 2 peo­ple costs £8.95). Con­sumers can pick a spe­cif­ic date for deliv­ery and Sat­ur­day deliv­er­ies are avail­able for no addi­tion­al cost.

All of the con­ve­nient ser­vice deliv­ery options are still avail­able on mobile:

In fact, the expe­ri­ence is enhanced to a degree by GPS func­tion­al­i­ty, allow­ing users to find their near­est store and check stock lev­els.

Post-Purchase

Whichev­er method con­sumers choose to check out with, Argos look to build post-pur­chase loy­al­ty by reward­ing cus­tomers who com­plet­ed a pur­chase, offer­ing a gift vouch­er to all con­sumers spend­ing over a cer­tain thresh­old to pro­vide them with an incen­tive to return and buy again:

The cam­paign was like­ly effec­tive in the hol­i­day sea­son among con­sumers who made mul­ti­ple hol­i­day gift pur­chas­es.

Create Awareness & Build Loyalty

Cre­at­ing aware­ness is often about brand iden­ti­ty, and pro­mot­ing an under­stand­ing of that to con­sumers. How do con­sumers per­ceive or feel about a brand? Do they believe they will get a first-class ser­vice? Do they need your ser­vices in their lives? Do they trust you?

Before con­sumers engaged in their pur­chase jour­neys, many would have had an aware­ness of Argos brand. It’s brand equi­ty which engen­ders a cer­tain lev­el of trust among con­sumers, and with dig­i­tal media it’s become an area which brands can look to devel­op and improve.

Suc­cess­ful man­age­ment of brand equi­ty cre­ates aware­ness and builds loy­al­ty among con­sumers – in many ways the two are inter­linked, and for that rea­son, while fun­da­men­tal­ly the prac­tices are nec­es­sary for every oth­er stage of the jour­ney, it rep­re­sents the begin­ning and the end of a brand’s vir­tu­ous cir­cle.

Affirm­ing trust amongst con­sumers increas­es the pow­er of a brands con­sumers jour­ney, which is why ear­li­er this year, Argos looked to answer some of these ques­tions with a rebrand­ing ini­tia­tive that looked to com­mu­ni­cate the iden­ti­ty and heart of the brand.

Rebranding

Ear­li­er this year, Argos rolled out a high pro­file rebrand­ing and TV adver­tis­ing cam­paign:

The cam­paign shows how Argos is build­ing a sense of iden­ti­ty via dig­i­tal media, not being afraid to go left when every­one else is going right.

Stephen Vowles, Argos’ mar­ket­ing direc­tor said of the rebrand­ing cam­paign:

“We want peo­ple to think and feel dif­fer­ent­ly about the Argos brand. The dis­tinc­tive space we want to own is more heart­beats, rather than heart­strings. Lots of retail­ers do ads that make you go ‘aaaaa’. We do need an emo­tion­al con­nec­tion but that is prob­a­bly not Argos’ ter­ri­to­ry, our ter­ri­to­ry is about the excite­ment, the speed of get­ting the prod­ucts you want.”

Social Media

Social media has been evolv­ing into a chan­nel that works very well for gen­er­at­ing aware­ness. Some of the activ­i­ty Argos embark in on social media includes:

Twit­ter com­pe­ti­tions:

We’re cel­e­brat­ing our new #Bose online shop with a great com­pe­ti­tion! Enter here: http://t.co/Adjd3O32vy pic.twitter.com/bTwBWQQ3tP

— Argos (@Argos_Online) Novem­ber 17, 2014

Dis­counts to encour­age fol­low­ers and engage­ment:

Get set for free vouch­ers! Get a free £5/£10 vouch­er when you spend £50/£100 or more: http://t.co/SwSiJjA1Uj pic.twitter.com/88JB5qfftS — Argos (@Argos_Online) Novem­ber 17, 2014

Celebri­ty endorse­ments, char­i­ty, and cor­po­rate ethics, respon­si­bil­i­ty:

Last chance to donate to the #argos­toyex­change! Drop off your once-loved toys @barnados @Argos_Online

— Tess Daly (@TessDaly) Novem­ber 14, 2014

Addi­tion­al­ly, this sea­son­al adver­tis­ing video feeds / inte­grat­ed with social media cam­paign: #gift­for­san­ta Engag­ing con­sumers:

I liked a @YouTube video http://t.co/JROiuH6MiD @Sarah181D Mobile Phone #Gift­For­San­ta Alien Dad Response — Sarah :) (@SarahWin94) Feb­ru­ary 4, 2014

The activ­i­ty makes for good num­bers, with the brand win­ning a strong fol­low­ing as a result of con­sis­tent posts on the chan­nel:

Organic Search (Revisited):

As a final note, Argos also cre­ate aware­ness via organ­ic search, which is a tes­ta­ment to how ver­sa­tile the chan­nel real­ly in reach­ing con­sumers.

The brand achieved trac­tion on sea­son­al organ­ic key­words such as “black fri­day deals”:

A ded­i­cat­ed land­ing page was cre­at­ed for the event:

It’s no sur­prise that Argos was one of the bet­ter per­form­ing brands over the Black Fri­day week­end.

Key Moments

• Mul­ti-plat­form social media activ­i­ty, inte­grat­ed with offline brand build­ing and iden­ti­ty.
• Excep­tion­al organ­ic per­for­mance on tra­di­tion­al cat­e­go­ry strong­holds.
• PLA and PPC invest­ment for com­pet­i­tive prod­uct and prod­uct cat­e­gories.
• Ded­i­cat­ed land­ing pages and good range of prod­ucts.
• Pop­u­lar, well-reviewed (on the site), and rec­om­mend­ed prod­ucts also check out well in organ­ic search.
• Ban­ner adver­tis­ing and spon­sored ads on review sites to refer con­sumers back to the site.
• Incen­tive to return: £10 off sec­ond pur­chase.
• Strong point: Class lead­ing ser­vice and prod­uct deliv­ery. Fast-track, click and col­lect, choos­ing deliv­ery date, cre­ates an excep­tion­al cus­tomer expe­ri­ence that will build loy­al­ty and inspire users to pur­chase again.

Final Thoughts

The con­sumer jour­ney is com­plex, and at times con­sumers may stray toward a com­peti­tor, or dis­ap­pear entire­ly. Con­sumers shop­ping online don’t move down the fun­nel in a straight line, but via a com­plex, inter­twin­ing jour­ney, and brands should look to meet con­sumers at a vari­ety of touch­points, or moments, where and when con­sumers are seek­ing their guid­ance and input.

How­ev­er, on the whole, the above exam­ples show that Argos main­tains an excep­tion­al pres­ence across a com­plete range of touch­points along the con­sumer jour­ney, some­times bal­anc­ing bud­gets and resources to remain com­pet­i­tive, and scal­ing their efforts for their large cat­a­logue of prod­ucts.

Doing this enables Argos to main­tain the so-called “fly­wheel” that has become indica­tive of pow­er­ful ecom­merce per­for­mance, enabling them to offer com­pet­i­tive pric­ing, expe­ri­ences, and an attrac­tive val­ue propo­si­tion for con­sumers.

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What brands do you think cater for an excep­tion­al user expe­ri­ence across the whole pur­chase jour­ney?