Blending Creativity & Commerce The Million dollar question
Almost daily I am asked to come up with a plan for a business which needs Turbo charging and more often than not two things are wrong ... a) the brand has become tired so that it no longer appeals to its customers or b) the business now does something different and the brand does not reflect today's product proposition AND the way the products are being sold are at odds with how their customers now browse and buy them. In today's fast moving world, this is not uncommon but the the trick is how to manage & fix both at the same time.
In truth, its a case of trial and error, test and learn ... small baby steps to get what you do right, so that your customers understand it and crucially so do you. Do too much all at once and its likely you will get the worst of both worlds, a confused customer and poor sales performance.
Sadly there are seldom any quick fixes but here are a 5 things which will help to blend creativity and commerce in your business:
1. Understand what your market is doing - whats on trend, what are your competitors doing, what insights are out there which might help you plan carefully and scientifically what you are going to do next.
2. Understand your shopper / target audience - be really prescriptive here and ensure that your proposition appeals to your target. Understand who you want to target, be forensic in learning everything you can about them & be expansive in your thinking. This may mean doing 3 different things which appeal to your different shopper type ... different creative, different price points are ok.
3. Market to them with content they want - irrelevant content, emailers, shop windows, ad campaigns are sadly too frequent. Don't do this, be true to your brand. For instance don't use Cara Delevigne to advertise an anti wrinkle cream, that would be madness ... oops sorry Dior already did this & most beauty brands do this every day!
4. Test & Learn - mixing creativity and commerce is all about trying a few different things out to see which one works and then once you know doing more of it. Too often I see businesses not doing so & almost always the results are not what they wanted. Use the data you glean from each campaign, from a promotion, from your web & mobile traffic to help you refine what you do next. Listen to it, data is rarely wrong!
5. Be innovative - I predict that AR will be the big win for E commerce and High street brands this year. Its disruptive and it should be used to help drive sales ... L'Oreal's recent acquisition of Modiface is a disruptive move as they seek to cash in over the next few years on this trend which is set to be worth $114Bn this year.
