Saturday afternoon in Ikea
+ Zero Party Data | Casa Magazines in NYC | Bottega's marketing ingenuity | PSFK Future of Retail | Ian Rogers on crypto / retail
1/ Ain’t no party like a Zero (Data) Club Party
A good read on how and why brands are increasingly going ‘D2C’ (spoiler: data collection), with reference to Nike and Uniqlo ‘prioritising localised stores and community engagement’.
The article also references Bottega Veneta - I’ve been enjoying observing the brand’s evolution since I worked (briefly) with them in late 2018-early 2019 on a retail concept.
During that project there was a shift in personnel - most notably in the marketing team. It’s interesting to see their current masterclass in targeting without social. In the last month I’ve seen a guy toting an enormous ‘Bottega Green’ bag in Soho, a vast painted ad going up in Shoreditch (above) and their latest pop-up on Redchurch Street. I’m not their customer (lol), but I love seeing how creative the minds at Bottega are with these tactics that are putting many other ‘proper’ luxury players in the shade - and without an Instagram account of its own. It can be done.
sidenote: Vogue Biz has done a great job of stealing a bit of a march on BoF, hasn’t it? Maybe there’s life in that dusty old Condé Nast empire after all…
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02/ Good listens
Speaking of BoF, this chat with Ian Rogers (formerly of LVMH, now at crypto wallet company Ledger is a good listen - helped me understand the crypto / metaverse world that bit better by framing it with existing behaviours).
And I had this one saved too - some good insight into how Browns has met its new digital consumer.
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2/ PSFK Future of Retail 2042
I tuned into this the other week. Some interesting conversation on both screen and in the chat. Highlights of the Omni-Channel consumer one included Tom Goodwin claiming that ‘there’s no evidence whatsoever that people crave privacy’. Hmm. Tbf, he did go on to say how important it is for there to be trust between consumers and brands. As simple as that sounds, it’s really important. The relationship requires respect and empathy - this is often lacking. Eric Mogil mentioned some work with Michael Kors where the customers told them about where they shopped, what their shoe sizes etc. were. “They shared their size before their age.” Telling. Ask the right questions in the right manner!
Other things that hit the spot for me:
don’t be obsessed with driving the customer to your website. Remove the barriers, as they’d say in consultancy-speak
Natasha Jakubowski of Anomaly telling it like it is: there are too many brands; too much consumption
Tom Goodwin rounded it off (c 33mins) with a nice bit on us living through a time of abundance and that we are now at a critical point to reimagine our behaviour
Which brings me on to…
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3/ Google’s consumer decision making analysis
Simple and useful, this (thanks to my desk-mate Simon for sharing).
Category heuristics = facts about a product
Authority bias = who has your ear
Social proof = what’s everyone else doing?
Power of Now = we are wired to live in the present
Scarcity bias = time / availability
Power of Free = cos people love free stuff and are irrational with it
The report has a few insights that are of note too (for instance, what ‘free’ tended to mean in search before vs. now).
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4/ Casa Magazines created an Instagram account and it saved its business
Roll back even five years and I’d argue it would have been hard to foresee how important Instagram has become to small businesses. This story from the NYT is a nice, shortish read. I imagine there’s plenty more ‘old’ businesses who could still do with help on reaching a ‘digitally-native’ audience.
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5/ Saturday afternoon in Ikea
I love the internet sometimes.
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And on that note, I’ll bid you farewell.
Thanks for reading.