Monthly Archives: May 2014

Link

When retailer advertising and reality collide

Petco Ad

Petco’s new Ad campaign. Does it over-promise?

Petco has begun a new ad campaign aimed at pulling at the heartstrings of pet owners and building an emotional connection to their brand, but like any brand-building advertising, the commercials are writing checks that the store experience has to cash. I admit that the ads are a refreshing break from the sea of urgent offers and endless deals that we are exposed to continuously on our TVs. With the line “The power of together”, they are well written, well executed, and amplify our awareness of the connections we have with our dogs and cats. The “co” device links this notion of our lives being enriched by our pets with the otherwise emotionless Petco name. The ads may drive consideration for Petco, but what happens when shoppers give Petco a try?

Retailers need traffic, and ultimately the ads need to drive shoppers to change their behavior and switch from Walmart, PetSmart, or their grocery store and become Petco regulars. But there is a big risk in inflating this emotional balloon and setting expectations too high. Can the stores and the associates live up to the promise? The ads, in fact, are built around the out-of-store experience with your pet, but where is the role of the store in the brand promise since it is the primary brand touch point? I do shop at Petco and I believe the ads validate my choice, but I shop there because they are smaller stores and easier to get in and out quickly. That is a real benefit.

The root of the issue is that Petco is not a lifestyle brand, it is a brand that enables shoppers to find what they need to take care of their pets. Lifestyle brands (great examples are Harley-Davidson and Nike) need to create an emotional connection with their customers to create value and drive demand. They create products that are like empty vessels which they fill with the dreams and aspirations of their audience. The emotions fuel the “want”. Most retailers create value through providing access to needs and wants, not creating needs and wants, and they are easily substitutable by other stores or channels (with the exception of fashion specialty retailers). Being biased toward lifestyle, the Petco ads do a better job of selling the virtues of owning a pet than providing a reason to shop their stores. If anything they stimulate consumers to take better care of their pets, but that could just mean trading up to premium food brands at any store.

I have seen numerous retailers venture down the seductive path of over promising in advertising. These campaigns may give the audience goosebumps, but they don’t communicate a strong “why shop here” or deliver a commensurate emotional reward in the store. Don’t get me wrong… store experiences need an emotional component, but an advertising campaign alone is not the solution. Great experience strategy and design are the means to creating an emotionally rewarding store experience. So here is my message to retailers: when your agency pitches a highly emotional campaign, ask if it is selling any benefits provided by your actual store experience.

I do believe that there are retailers out there who are getting it right, and are able to reconcile what their brands are about while communicating a plausible promise their stores can and do deliver.

First is Radio Shack’s Superbowl ad, featuring the “80’s called and want their store back” idea. Radio Shack went right at their main problem- the perception of irrelevance. The quick transformation of the store in the ad to a new image and experience was celebrating the store like no ad I had ever seen. Whether they have converted their whole fleet to deliver on the promise I do not know, but the stores around me are refreshed, so it worked (I bought some batteries).

The second, and more prolific, is the “Corner of Happy and Healthy” campaign by GSD&M for Walgreens. This campaign is rooted in the accessibility of the store and the authority of Walgreens as a headquarters of good health. The tagline is also versatile enough to work for category specific messaging in weekly ads and in-store displays, so it becomes a piece of the experience itself.

For retailers, the store is the story. Lifestyle brands can use emotions to play a big role in driving demand and creating preference, but emotional brand messaging to drive traffic for a retailer is a slippery slope that can lead to dissatisfaction if the experience is not aligned in a reinforcing way. Play to your store’s strengths and how your brand creates value through the experience, then activate the emotional content in the store itself.

Bill Chidley is a Partner and Co-Founder at ChangeUp. Creating Innovating Experiences that Drive Growth. http://www.changeupinc.com

Image

Color Coding and the Shopper Experience

traffic-lightUsing color-coding as a means of assisting the shopper in the aisle seems like a logical idea, but is it? In my experience it deserves the classic “yes and no” answer: sometimes it is a good solution and sometimes it just adds noise.

 

I was inspired to write about this when I came upon a men’s grooming area within the personal care department of a newly remodeled Rite Aid last week. The solution looked good overall in terms of merchandising, adjacencies, and masculine theme, and was likely authored by a major CPG company for this retail account using sound shopper insights and a compelling business case. What caught my attention was an area on the endcap dedicated to helping shoppers navigate the categories within the men’s grooming sub-department with color-coding. Below the “Men’s Grooming” message was a stack of 5 basic colors with corresponding words intended to act as a color-key to the shopping experience. The colors extended to blade signs along the fixture that served as destination markers or “brackets” for each category (yellow=deodorant, orange=shaving, etc.).

 

Rite Aid Men's Grooming

Rite Aid Men’s Grooming

 

This is a great example of color-coding not adding value to the experience. The presumption is that the shopper will take time to associate colors with categories, commit them to memory, use them to navigate as they go around the two-sided fixture, and even possibly build a multi-item basket by shopping every color. This is unrealistic behavior in this category and many others because It doesn’t pass the “would YOU do that?” test. Yellow, blue, red, orange, and green color-coding might have some utility if they were shopping for fruit-flavored candy (because of sensory associations), but have no association with this merchandise… and neither would another set of colors. In this case color-coding is not appropriate whereas literal photographic or illustrative solutions would be more effective communicating categories. Additionally, a more visually compelling  solution would illicit a positive emotional response which could stop more shoppers.

 

The reason color-coding can be a miss is because colors have meaning and the brain seeks meanings that make sense.  Colors can be strongly related to the category (as I have referenced for flavors), potentially have strong brand associations (like orange for Tide detergent), or have a cultural/social currency (like green for environmentally responsible). Colors out of context are at best noise and at worst confusing. Our brains will spend a small amount of time unconsciously trying to rectify the colors with the circumstance, but quickly abandon the job if it is not immediately clicking. In the Rite Aid example shoppers’ brains likely dismiss them as junk communications. They can adequately rely on product packaging and product forms on the shelves to identify the categories. The type on the blade signs provide clear communications of what merchandise is out of view and where categories begin and end. In this case the color does not provide value and becomes mere decoration.

 

Hardware aisle

Hardware fastener aisle

In contrast, an appropriate use of color-coding is when the nature of the merchandise itself does not signal key category breaks or product applications, as often seen in hardware. In an example of an aisle of screws and nuts, invisible details like thread type and hex heads versus slotted heads are important to the shopper. Here the shopper is willing to invest in understanding the color-coding on the fixtures because it saves them time and frustration. The packaging (from a single vendor in this case) corresponds to the fixture color so it is an integrated solution. The actual colors are inconsequential, and another retailer or vendor may successfully use different colors, as long as they provide the same organizing utility. There is also little or no impulse or emotional element in shopping for nuts and bolts, so the color-coding is enough to provide a great experience.

These are admittedly “man-centric” examples, but you will find similar good and bad examples across all categories, including women’s skincare. Here is a cosmetics display that uses the warm/neutral/cool color-coding system to organize shades. In this situation, even though the packaging shows the true colors, the visual differences of the products are not adequate to build purchase confidence for the shopper. The color-coding helps shoppers stay within shade groups based on their unique needs.

Cosmetic display with effective color coding

Cosmetic display with effective color coding

 

Before venturing down a path to color-coding as a navigation tool for your shopper experience, think about the following checklist.

Color coding is a great shopper tool when:

  • The product variations are not immediately evident by product or packaging form or  other high-priority packaging communications. (Nuts and Bolts, Light bulbs, batteries, etc.)
  • Cultural or social color associations exist in the categories that may be stronger than the dominant brand colors or product/packaging signals on the shelf. (Orange for de-caffeinated coffee, green for eco-friendly, pink for little girls/blue for little boys, etc.)
  • The understanding of compatible products is important to enable shopping for system components (Smartphone or game console accessories, and the cosmetic example above).

If your categories or departments do not have any of these three challenges, you are probably going to find color-coding less effective and should look for other ways to manage navigation. Color is powerful and if you don’t need to use it for navigation, seek to use it for another purpose that evokes a mood, creates disruption, or projects an attitude.

 

Bill Chidley is a Branding and Experience Design Consultant with over 29 years of experience.

Connected Objects: The New Frontier for Brand Building

 

Mother sensors from Sen.se

Mother sensors from Sen.se

 

Did your elderly parents take their medications? Did you remember to feed the cat? Did the kids get picked up by the bus after school? Is your car getting the best gas mileage it can achieve? These and thousands of similar questions migrate in and out of our conscious thoughts all the time.  Now welcome to a new world where common anxiety is first heightened, and then overcome by constant connectivity to smart objects and sensors embedded in our lives. Get ready to have the words “monitor” and “notification” be two of the most common terms in our lexicon as smart objects become increasingly part of our daily experiences. The smartphones we now can’t live without are at the cusp of being extensions of our consciousness and tools for coping with our complex personal lives. Interpersonal communication and access to information was just the tip of the mobile-digital iceberg.

Our phones are fast becoming remote controls for our lives with objects as ordinary as our lamps at home already becoming controllable from anywhere. But according to Trendwatching.com http://trendwatching.com/trends/internet-of-caring-things/ , the internet is evolving to be about connected objects, or caring things, that we interact with via our iPhones and Android phones that will monitor and alert us to everything from the mundane to life threatening. Today’s breaking headlines and weather alerts will be augmented with notifications that we aren’t drinking enough water or that our floor needs to be vacuumed. How we consume, what we consume, and what triggers our actions will be transformed from passive to active. How should Brands think about this imminent reality? They certainly should not watch from the sidelines as connecting technologies like Nest https://nest.com/ and Mother https://sen.se/ potentially become trusted advisors in consumers’ lives regarding prioritizing their needs and suggesting their behaviors.

The imminent invasion of connected devices will give our homes, cars, and workplaces their own kind of consciousness that will further dilute our involvement with traditional media and change the way consumers will want to learn about and engage with brands. Retail and consumer brands who integrate into this consciousness will build strong relationships with their customers. The omni-channel centric fixation we need today is just the foundation for this future. Digital strategy will need to evolve to truly integrate seamlessly into the consumer’s world of notifications, indications, “settings” and required solutions that will be manifest in this new virtual “third hemisphere” of our brain that extends our awareness via our mobile devices.

How might this look? First think how your brand can be relevant to this expanded consciousness of connected devices. This may be easier to achieve for retailers and consumer products brands that provide life’s needs versus wants, but social anxiety is real and can also be an aperture in which to engage. What notifications can a brand provide that are not immediately linked to replenishment but seek to forge a necessary relationship? Next think of digital innovation differently, evolving from addressing need states to overcoming anxiety states. How can your brand intervene in a moment of potential distress or, better yet, be a proactive partner and get credit for avoiding distress? What products or services could you provide that uniquely support your brand’s purpose and mission and can be monetized and delivered via notifications? What potential partnerships exist between your Brand and the emerging world of smart, connected objects?

The need for brand strategies to maximize the potential of connected objects and the apps that enable them will be new territory and require experimentation with new roles for retailers and consumer brands alike.  The potential is a completely new medium with which to engage and create value. It will be fascinating to see how we expand the notion of relevance and innovation in the future as the boundary between us and our “things” blurs, and our values shift from consuming to connecting with Brands as extensions of our senses.

 

Bill Chidley is a Branding and Experience Design Consultant with over 29 years of experience at Interbrand.