In a world where legacy brands are increasingly being challenged by new upstarts, cannier traditional companies are taking note of how the arrivistes do business. Kate Ancketill, an expert on innovations and emerging trends in retail, provided an insight into 21st century brands for NBF members at the association’s annual Spring Forum – industry specialist Jan Turner reports …
A disrupter from the outset, Ikea has always done business differently. Unusually for a mid- to low-price brand, it has become one of world’s most innovative companies, with one recent example being its approach to promoting bedding to millennials.
To do so it created a Sleep Event, through a raffle in which the winning 60 couples got an overnight stay in Switzerland. They arrived at midnight and left at eight in morning, sleeping in a large hall filled with the winners’ 60 pre-chosen beds and bedding. During the night, a famous musician performed an eight-hour piece of lullaby music, and there was also an adjacent rest room filled with Ikea furniture for anyone wanting to take a break.
Clever stuff. And totally in tune with marketing to a population sector which will very soon be the most powerful of all consumer groups. It was also an example of contextual marketing – at which Ikea is proving particularly adept, as witnessed again in the run-up to the recent opening of its new Sheffield store.
In the two weeks before launch, the company dressed the city with everything from cushions and other accessories, to recovered seats on the trams. It created a sense of excitement and anticipation which ensured the whole town was on board and behind the new store.
This out-of-the-box thinking is particularly well typified by many new upstart companies which make a virtue out of challenging the status quo and deftly nipping into niche opportunities.
There is not a traditional FMCG brand in the world, says Kate Ancketill, CEO of CDR Creative Intelligence, that is not anxious about this.
Despite these worries, in the new-versus-old order there’s a tendency for complacency, and even laziness, among big estate concerns, or those with olde-worlde products that have been expensively advertised for a long time. The new order of digital-first, direct-to-consumer brands typically offer a narrow product range, and are backed by venture capitalists, allowing them to spend big money on marketing, so nicking the limelight from more-established products.
The bed industry itself doesn’t need to look too far for examples of this, with the Leesas, Eves and Jaspers of this world doing just that.
More usually, it has been the glamorous fashion and beauty brands with the budget and clout that have led the way in innovative, high-profile marketing campaigns. But increasingly it is the new disrupters who are setting the agenda.
Glossier is a classic example. One of the most successful new brands taking the world by storm, it was started by a teenage blogger and now has millions of followers. Important to many young upstart brands is the way they communicate across customer touchpoints, with little details making a big impact.
With Glossier, millennials love such touches as the stickers sent with online orders to customise their packaging. The same visual language is used on the website - as the cursor moves across product images, it changes each time into, perhaps, a banana, sunglasses, or lipstick – the same as the images used on the stickers. It’s a tiny thing, but it’s all about reflecting the brand culture.
Increasingly, that’s about having a bit of fun and humour. Take Citymapper, a business which started as an app and now has its own buses thanks to the sheer data accumulated through customer enquiries which highlighted the areas of London not being adequately covered by existing city buses.
As well as having established itself as a definitive London brand, the company offers a bit of comic relief to its users – ask the app how you get from A to B, and while it may guide you to the right bus, it might also throw in the jokey suggestion of taking a jetpack, which it illustrates with a fun video of a Boris Johnson caricature making the trip through the air. Time spent with this brand is time spent having fun.
Some take a more controversial route to communicating their message, with bed-in-a-box brand Leesa a good case in point. The company chose to highlight a five-star review it had received from someone who claimed to have almost died when a fire started in their building. Their new bed, they claimed, was so comfortable, that they simply didn’t wake up – it’s not everyone’s marketing cuppa, but it did, apparently, lead to an +18% uplift in sales.
Then there’s the us-versus-them approach exemplified by Warby Parker, another American brand taking the world by storm. It sells spectacles for around $90-100 a pair for any single-focus lens, making it much cheaper than the competition and very stylish to boot.
For every pair sold, the company also gives another away to the developing world – a 21st century approach to marketing which says “we are the upstarts and we are angry about this monopoly situation. Glasses are too expensive, and prices artificially high, so we are going to bust this market open. Buying glasses should be easy and fun”.
Add to that some artful videos which show in detail how the glasses are made – all very artisan – and it’s an approach which has ensured consumers like them already. At the company’s dozens of US stores, customers are 10-deep at the counter, and it’s perceived as the kind of sexy brand young people are super-keen to work for.
Examples of the new rebel culture commerce go on. Ritual is yet another venture capital-funded startup which essentially sells vitamins but positions itself as a wellness business, challenging the way in which American women are being ‘ripped off’ and sold unnecessary vitamins and supplements. The message is ‘you can trust us not to sell you stuff you don’t need.’
Away is another digital-first brand selling luggage which, while stylish, isn’t that different from anything else available. What makes the brand desirable is its Nespresso approach to marketing - lots of celebrity endorsements, its own magazine which talks about travel through good solid content rather than marketing fluff, and podcasts about why we travel and where we find ourselves.
It essentially appeals to millennial consumers’ need for experiences rather than stuff, and in so doing has achieved a sex-status brand perception in the unsexy world of luggage.
Also making it to super-sex status is Allbirds - the hottest new shoe brand in America. Made of wool, the shoes are said to be the world’s most comfortable. And Allbirds stores take a retail approach unlike any other shoe shop. The focus is all about wool – there is a video of sheep, customers sit at a bar, study a document about wool and then request their shoe size.
They are then able to try out the footwear on a woollen ‘cloud’ before putting the shoes through their paces on a hamster wheel - once again, all of the touchpoints have been very purposefully thought through.
In France, DIY store Castorama managed to do something very special with its brand. Recognising that home improvement is about facilitating happiness for the family, the store introduced Magic Wallpaper for children’s bedrooms, which sells for just $9.99 a roll.
Essentially, it is the first wallpaper to tell stories, with each character featured on the paper acting as a digital marker which, when scanned in with the app, provides a different story for every character or combination of characters. There are hundreds of bedtime stories to be told, the message being that if you improve your child’s bedroom, you improve their life with lots of stories and adventures to be shared with the family before going to sleep.
The bottom line is that many new brands are taking a much more contextual approach to marketing, and often communicating their message in a much more fun and informal way.
And there is much to take from the way they do business. Are you a chatty, down-to-earth, very human sort of brand? Or a big corporate that’s seen as being reliable – but perhaps not very exciting?
Or have you managed to achieve Ikea status, successfully marrying your corporate giant heritage with digital-first upstart thinking to literally paint the town red – or perhaps even scatter it with cushions?
