Champions Adjust ...

While that applies to everyone, here I am speaking specifically to marketers in these challenging times.

I spent the formative years of my career in consumer strategy positions at what was then one of the best communications agencies in the world – Grey. As a strategist my job was to inform creative efforts with the right strategy based on strong consumer relevance and competitive differentiation. That meant I often developed strategies that didn’t match creatives’ intuition. Fortunately, I had a creative head who would always say “Champions Adjust”. That saying has never been more true than for retailers today.

With Covid-19 and the new retail restrictions, retailers are all scrambling to figure out what they can do to generate some sales to offset the impact of the constraints now in place. So, what to do, how can marketing help?

Growing or, at the very least, regaining some sales mojo in this new world requires accepting a few basic truths:

1. What makes for great retail in-store, what makes it the preferred way to shop for most items – when it’s right? To state the obvious when it is right it engages all the senses in an experience that stimulates – it engages sight, sound, smell, touch and, in the case of food retailers, taste.
2. What channels do we have at our disposal? Success, at least in the short to medium term, will be based on the ability to grow 1) online delivered sales and 2) sales from customers buying online and picking up at store (curbside). And we are beginning to see a wholesale focus on that – not just restaurant take out and delivery but even the big boxes are on it, Best Buy is one of the latest to begin heavily marketing this
3. All of this means that the critical focus for marketing will need to be on getting more people to crave coming to shop and buy at your website – finding ways to “trigger the crave” for your store and your products – and once on your site making sure you unleash the full power of those triggers to be sure they complete a sale.

You might be saying, I know that. The question is what are you doing about it? What are you doing with your site and your digital marketing efforts to mimic what creates a great in-store experience? Are you creating materials that engage multiple senses or are you still just relying on flat pictures and word materials to engage and excite customers and prospects?

A quick “click trip” across the internet tells me that most retailers aren’t doing much; they are still relying solely on flat picture and word materials – very few are using their home pages to create excitement and a sense of experience. In the 30+ websites of major retailers I visited today not one was using sound and only 2 were using video. And they were not even doing that well; a restaurant just had a video talking about the quality and sustainability of its sourcing; a fashion retailer just had a bland video strip running across the top of its homepage.

Some of you may remember when all we had was TV advertising to “trigger the crave”. And so, some of us worked really hard at developing advertising that used the 2 senses at our disposal to trigger that crave – movement and sound. For example, in the 1980s-90s at Grey we developed a campaign that tried to activate multiple senses in a craving for seafood at Red Lobster. We used the sights & sounds of seafood cooking to engage and activate your taste buds. It’s old and the film & sound nothing like what we could create today on the internet but this is conceptually what I am getting at, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOUu4UHJc7g).

Here is how it might work on websites recognizing that digital advertising could easily be created to complement this idea …

1. For restaurants: e.g., Red Lobster, to activate the internet when you hit their home page a :5 clip of shrimp scampi sizzling or a lobster claw being cracked fills the screen – “stimulating the crave”, making people want to / got to get some. And, of course these clips could be customized around their various promotions – Crab Fest, Shrimp Fest, Lobster Fest, etc. And would just be the beginning of how you integrate sound and video into their site
2. For Department Stores: e.g., Macy’s, to activate the internet when you hit their home page a :5 clip of Macy’s iconic events (fireworks, flower show, going into Herald Square fills the screen – stimulating the feeling of excitement when you enter Herald Square. And, of course these clips could be customized around their various promotions – picnic in the park for a Memorial Day sale, fireworks with NYC backdrop for 4th Of July sale, etc.
3. For Specialty Stores: e.g., REI, to activate the internet when you hit their home page a :5 clip of a seasonally appropriate outdoor adventure fills the screen – stimulating the adrenalin one gets from that kind of experience. And, again, these clips could be customized to feature seasonally appropriate adventures in line with their sales cadence.

For retail to salvage itself it must do what I and others have been asking for years – “Activate The Internet”. By unleashing the full power of movement and sound we can enhance the online brand experience both in advertising and even more so on your site. Sure, it will certainly miss the impact of the olfactory sense -- the smell of baked cookies, intoxicating fragrances, etc. But, merely activating the available power of movement and sound will go a long way. The old adage, “Necessity is the mother of invention” should play well now and perhaps retailers will take head.

Your thoughts?