On 29th Octo­ber Linkdex, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Leapfrogg, host­ed a round­table with dig­i­tal mar­keters from a select group of UK retail­ers — includ­ing TK Maxx, Kurt Geiger, Pre­mier Inn, Riv­er Island, and dig­i­tal agency Incred­i­bly — to dis­cuss the intri­ca­cies of pre­mi­um retail.

After all, pre­mi­um retail is a fas­ci­nat­ing niche. It’s no ordi­nary pur­chase jour­ney con­sumers under­go when they indulge in a design­er hand­bag, pair of shoes, or lux­u­ry fra­grance — and as the day unfold­ed it quick­ly became clear, that (espe­cial­ly in dig­i­tal con­texts) there’s still a great deal of oppor­tu­ni­ties for brands and retail­ers in the sec­tor…

Content Lessons from Premium Retailers

Lucy Free­born, Insight and Strat­e­gy Direc­tor at Leapfrogg, kicked off pro­ceed­ings with a pre­sen­ta­tion on Con­tent Lessons from Pre­mi­um Retail­ers. Leapfrogg, who spe­cialise in pre­mi­um retail and lux­u­ry brands, are an award win­ning agency built around a ‘cus­tomer-first’ phi­los­o­phy. The approach is par­tic­u­lar­ly fit­ting for pre­mi­um retail, and allows Leapfrogg to real­ly under­stand what makes cus­tomer tick when they’re shop­ping for lux­u­ry goods.

Leapfrogg’s engage­ment reports, reg­u­lar­ly rank the top retail­ers in the health & beau­ty, footwear, fur­ni­ture, and pre­mi­um fash­ion ver­ti­cals, scor­ing each retail on con­tent and engage­ment.

Engagement Case Studies

Lucy picked out four retail­ers, each with their own pos­i­tives and neg­a­tives around their con­tent and retail strate­gies, name­ly beautybay.com, Kurt Geiger, loaf, and Mr Porter.

What do each of these brands do well, and what could they do bet­ter? Check out the case stud­ies in Lucy’s pre­sen­ta­tion:

Four very dif­fer­ent strate­gies. From beautybay’s social media suave, to Kurt Geiger’s excel­lent PR and celebri­ty endorse­ment, loaf’s spot-on lifestyle focus, and Mr Porter’s incred­i­ble con­tent and retail syn­er­gy across the board, there are clear­ly many dif­fer­ent flavours of suc­cess.

How­ev­er, one clear take­away here is that qual­i­ty and depth of con­tent plays an impor­tant role for each of these brands. Fash­ion retail­ers are mar­ket­ing to the same audi­ence who might eas­i­ly peruse fash­ion mag­a­zines or cat­a­logues, and a key chal­lenge for many retail­ers in the indus­try will be in how to serve con­sumers with that same lev­el of con­tent across the sum of their dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences.

Addi­tion­al chal­lenges lie in remain­ing con­sis­tent across chan­nels, using social media to build brand sto­ry, and inte­grat­ing ecom­merce effec­tive­ly with­in con­tent expe­ri­ences (Mr Porter are per­haps the exem­plar case study for con­tent-ecom­merce inte­gra­tion).

Roundtable Takeaways

After the pre­sen­ta­tion dis­cus­sions formed around how pre­mi­um and fash­ion retail­ers could improve con­tent deliv­ery, and how indi­vid­ual chan­nels such as social could be bet­ter brought into a brand’s over­all goals and tar­gets.

Evi­dent­ly, there are no one-size-fits-all solu­tions here, but for pre­mi­um retail­ers look­ing to emu­late the suc­cess of the above brands, a plan of action could revolve around address­ing the fol­low­ing ques­tions:

• What do you want your con­tent to do?
  • e.g. to raise search visibility/awareness/retentions?What con­tent do your cus­tomers want?
• Is the con­sis­ten­cy and range of your con­tent on brand?
• Are your PR and dig­i­tal con­tent teams talk­ing?
• Are you max­imis­ing com­merce func­tions with­in social?
  • Are you util­is­ing Face­book data / Rich Pins / Insta­gram oppor­tu­ni­ties?

After a quick break for lunch, Kirsty Hulse got the dis­cus­sions going once again with her pre­sen­ta­tion on:

Fashion Publishing Strategy: Worth the Effort?

Kirsty’s pre­sen­ta­tion was an in-depth explo­ration of how retail­ers are becom­ing pub­lish­ers and pub­lish­ers are becom­ing retail­ers (evi­denced by Condé Nast’s move ear­li­er this year to turn style.com into an ecom­merce site, and Net-a-Porters sim­i­lar abil­i­ty to blend edi­to­r­i­al with great ecom­merce), and how suc­cess­ful a pub­lish­ing strat­e­gy can be for a brand’s onine per­for­mance (par­tic­u­lar with regard to organ­ic search).

So does a pub­lish­er approach improve SEO per­for­mance? Check out the snazzy charts and visu­al­iza­tions in the slides below to find out:

Roundtable Takeaways

Fas­ci­nat­ing stuff, and it’s no sur­prise that dis­cus­sions quick­ly turned to the intri­ca­cies of the jour­neys con­sumers take when engag­ing with lux­u­ry brands.…

That for exam­ple, rep­re­sents the typ­i­cal pur­chase jour­ney, but are con­sumer jour­neys chang­ing? Is the mil­len­ni­al pur­chase jour­ney chang­ing?

Per­haps when we make a search (for “din­ner jack­ets” for exam­ple) we want to land direct­ly on a prod­uct page? Then there are oth­er instances when per­haps we are look­ing for jour­nal con­tent, to learn or find out more about what’s on offer and maybe be inspired, or maybe indulge in an impulse pur­chase. In these cas­es, what should con­sumers be exposed to first? Prod­uct pages or con­tent pages?

In the case of TK Maxx things get even more inter­est­ing. A key USP for TK Maxx is for shop­pers to look for things that they might not specif­i­cal­ly have in mind, but to ven­ture in-store and have the chance of get­ting a great val­ue prod­uct from a design­er brand. In these cas­es how to you infuse that sense of dis­cov­ery or impul­sive­ness into the brand’s ecom­merce expe­ri­ence?

More ques­tions than answers at this point per­haps, but all in all a fas­ci­nat­ing round­table. Stay tuned for more on the Linkdex blog.