The Pepperspective

As retailers, we’re always looking for opportunities to engage our customers in a more meaningful way. Pinterest is a social networking site that promotes engagement and also holds the potential to drive sales. In fact, this newest social platform is projected to account for 40% of all social-driven revenue in the near future.   

Don’t take my word for it though.  Trust the stats:
·      1 in 5 users have pinned an item that they later purchased
·      21% of Pinterest users purchase items they pin either in-store or online

Naturally we’re all scrambling to get a piece of the Pinterest pie.  But if you want in on these amazing results, you need to know a thing or two about what works and doesn’t.  For starters, content is the single most important key to having a successful presence on this platform.  Beware though - pinners don’t want sales, discounts, and promotional materials thrown in their faces.  

So what is great content for Pinterest?

I love packaging… to the point where sometimes I buy products I don’t really need because I love the package so much.

When we (redpepper) recently got a chance to design some Halloween packaging for Kirkland’s Home store I was excited to be a part of the team working on new designs (excited might be an understatement… I was over the moon). You can read more about my love for packaging at  Judge a Book by it’s Cover.

Of course, when working on packaging designs there is a lengthy lag time til you actually see the finished packaging in the store. So, my designs were done months and months ago but I finally saw the finished products a  week ago when I visited a local Kirkland’s. I was happy to see my Halloween boxes and tags up front and center. Of course, I purchased a couple items myself but I also stuck around to watch a couple of customers interact with the products and make their own purchases too.

While I’m not ready to look at Christmas decorations before Halloween, many retailers are getting a jump on the holidays and planning promotional activities. Wondering what the season will hold? The folks at Retail Touchpoints may not have a crystal ball, but they’ve gathered some of the best insights from analysts and researchers and compiled them in a report called “Holiday Outlook 2011: Savvy Retailers Can Count On A Winning Season.”

With e-commerce, f-commerce, and m-commerce cluttering up the marketing landscape, this report can bring some clarity and focus to planning efforts for the holidays and beyond. Not only does it point out the advantages - and potential pitfalls - of emerging technologies, but it shares case studies and tactics from retailers who have successfully navigated some of this uncharted social territory.

Turn off the engine and step away from the bulldozer. Don’t tear down your brick-and-mortar location just yet…

It’s been obvious for a while now that the boundaries between the offline and online worlds are extremely blurred. Perhaps the easiest way to feel the online world interwoven with the offline one is to take a glance at today’s retail landscape. It’s nearly impossible to find a real world store that does not incorporate online.

The internet, the newest of media, has successfully redefined every medium.

Yet with all of the spending power that the internet holds, today there remains an even stronger reason to keep physical store locations.

Stay with me.

Keep the old with the new. With Facebook and other social sites acting as online shopping platforms, maximizing retail profits and really understanding customers online can be tricky. Learn from partner, Tim McMullen on how to increase your market share online without resorting solely to the latest social media platform for all the answers.

In the hey-day of advertising – way back in the 80s and 90s – the theory was, the crazier the idea, the better. Clients would literally say to their agencies, “Make me famous with a crazy stunt. Get my name out there.” Those were the days when marketing budgets were the size of the national debt.

But alas, those days seem to be gone, and not surprisingly, some of those marketing directors are also gone. Today, clients demand smart solutions to their business problems.

Recently, I read an article that compared social media to a dinner party. This illustration keeps coming to mind, and I find myself drawing parallels to how we, as retail marketers, play host at the social media table. 

My experience with social media engagement and customer perspective comes from my work with Kirkland’s, a specialty retailer for home décor items. Kirkland’s has an active fan base on both Facebook and its MyKirkland’s community site. Listening, and interacting with these customers daily through social media has helped me shape an understanding of what they expect and desire from the Kirkland’s brand. These customers’ expectations support the “brand as dinner party host,” metaphor in several ways:

The truth is consumers do judge a product by its packaging. If it looks cheap from the outside, we automatically think it is not a substantial product, causing some worthy products to go unsold. On the flip side, if the packaging looks nice but the price is low it is perceived as a “good deal”. 

I recently worked on new packaging design for Kirkland’s Halloween and Harvest product lines and found myself spending numerous hours researching package design. It’s not so bad when part of my research involved visiting some of my favorite stores (hello, shopping) and looking at cool packaging (I always enjoy admiring great design). 

In my research I found that Kirkland’s (and other home décor store) consumers are even more aware of packaging aesthetics, after all they are in a store buying home décor because it looks good, not because it’s a necessity. 

I have to admit, I am one of those consumers easily persuaded by pretty packages. Sometimes, I get home from an outing and realize I don’t really need a quarter of the products that I bought but the packaging sold me. Do you ever buy based on the packaging instead of the product?

Stay tuned for another post revealing the Kirkland’s new Harvest and Halloween packaging designs.

I’d like to propose a rule of thumb that you should always consider when developing offers and incentives specifically for retail brands: the rule of narrow and deep. This rule proposes that whatever your offer/incentive/promotion may be, first start with a simple core idea and then add as many layers as possible. 

“Social media.”

It’s the new buzzword. Everybody’s doing it.

But, while we’re all racing to be part of the next big thing, it’s easy to overlook a quieter way in which social media can prove extremely valuable: finding your brand’s voice. 

Two years ago, redpepper created the MyKirkland’s community site in order to strengthen the relationship between the Kirkland’s brand and its followers. With 6,000 members in the first month alone and more than 150,000 members to date, the bustling site is certainly serving its purpose. (Not to mention attracting quite a few new fans.) 

But MyKirkland’s has also proven valuable in a way that isn’t as immediately obvious. It has provided a front-row view into how our audience talks, thinks and acts. It has helped us understand what they care about and even what they don’t. In my notebook, these insights are worth more than any dollar amount. 

Let me back up. 

A few months ago, the subject of email marketing and design was still in the uncharted waters of my career. I had the very fortunate opportunity to be a lead creative for Kirkland’s email campaigns and learned some things that were quite eye opening. For a consistent, long term email campaign to remain interesting for the customer base, it requires a strong team of forward thinking managers and creatives who can focus on the big picture. The goal is to retain brand recognition while introducing fresh ideas and products to your customers that truly engage and excite them. The challenge comes from doing this several times a week and consistently driving them to further interact with your brand. Testing numerous elements throughout the campaign gave us powerful insights, enabling our team to craft emails that would engage the Kirkland’s customer base in the most effective way.

Is the constant chatter about your brand on Facebook keeping you up at night? Or maybe you’re worried there’s no talk at all? Are are you even listening? As a business, and specifically a retailer, what are the best ways to engage your core customers in social media and get in on the conversation in an authentic way? Learn from partner Tim McMullen key elements to keep in mind and actionable next steps for you to build relationships with your audience and manage your online reputation through social media. Forbes.com

With 600 million members as potential shoppers, Facebook is on its way to becoming the largest online retail hub ever with brands like Delta and Coca-Cola already on-board. Read about the fast-approaching age of F-commerce, or Facebook-based retailing, from redpepper partner Tim McMullen on Forbes.com.

The Concept & Strategy

Two and a half months ago, a small creative team started our concept and strategy session for Kirkland’s Q1 Facebook Promo. The goal of the promo was to generate 200,000 new fans in 28 days for Kirkland’s Facebook fan page. If you can imagine, more than seven people in a room yelling out ideas on top of each other back-to-back. One-after-one, we sliced and diced ideas that were too crazy and ideas that weren’t crazy enough. At redpepper, we like to be as edgy as our clients allow and test the demographics of our client’s consumer base as much as possible.

On April 18th, 2011, Kirkland’s appeared at the top of Media Logic’s top 10 list of fastest growing brands on Facebook for the week of April 10th.