Roundtable: Premium and Luxury Retail Hosted by Linkdex and Leapfrogg

On 29th Octo­ber Linkdex, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Leapfrogg, host­ed a round­table with dig­i­tal mar­keters to dis­cuss the intri­ca­cies of pre­mi­um retail.

Pat Hong By Pat Hong from Linkdex. Join the discussion » 0 comments

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:

Con­tent Lessons from Pre­mi­um Brands — Lucy Free­born, Leapfrogg from Linkdex

 

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:

Lux­u­ry Retail Fash­ion Pub­lish­ing Strat­e­gy: Worth the Effort? Kirsty Hulse — Linkdex from Linkdex

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.…

fashion-journey

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.

Pat Hong

Written by Pat Hong

Editor at Linkdex/Inked, Linkdex

Pat covers the SEO industry, digital marketing trends, and anything and everything around Linkdex. He also authors Linkdex's data analysis and reports, analysing the state of search in various industries.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

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