Agile campaigning - Embracing the new normal.

Generating actionable insight and sales for a premium luxury brand during the Christmas Lockdown period.

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The problem

Need you ask!?

In an already challenging quarter, Lockdown 2.0 brought fresh waves of misery to the retail sector when all non-essential shops were ordered to close once again at arguably their busiest time of year. Christmas 2020 was going to be a Christmas like no other before it. That much was certain.

The hypothesis

With everyone’s Christmas plans in flux and nothing being anywhere close to ‘normal’ this was the perfect opportunity to test new methodologies.

We created a formula combining our understanding of the consumer, their missions and the Operational environment. 

What people are actually doing now + How people tend to behave

/

 Omnichannel planning + Flexible Creative Assets + SPRINT mindset 

= 

Incremental Revenue (£)

This meant that we were able to respond quickly and decisively to shifting consumer behaviour and ever-flexing government policy.

Our Strategy

Understand Behaviour and Context

Step one was to use our understanding of the consumer and our contextual understanding (lockdowns, stores closing, less metropolitan more local shopping, the barriers to buying fragrance online...) to generate actionable insight about our consumers. 

We executed a pre-campaign deep dive to define and understand the shift in the consumer landscape since Christmas the previous year. Needless to say, this was significant! But the real time data showed that spend was holding up so incremental revenue was the key metric here.

Due to the altered retail landscape it was critical that we used multiple layers of data and contextual input to optimise the messaging flow taking into account both organisational factors such as stock levels, warehouse activity, delivery availability and also consumer behaviour such as browsing history.

Define Critical Missions

Key to the success of this campaign was also the recognition of consumer needs and motivations. 

As the old adage goes: all customers are not created equal.

Consequently, building journeys and content based on customer cohorts was important to create relevance and cut through – particularly at a time when consumers were being bombarded by marketing messages. By segmenting the customer base into distinct groups we were able to identify purchase patterns and phase communications accordingly. This level of data strategy meant we were able to use individual level data to overlay onto the broader groupings to create richer experiences.

Agree working practises and shared outcomes

Finally, and the most exciting part of the campaign was introducing new, more agile, ways of working to the mix. We used a fortnightly sprint based approach. Each two week sprint would start with reviewing insight on our defined customer segments from the preceding sprint. This insight was then used to plan the next two weeks’ activity adapting journeys, content and offers as we went.  

The results

The fiscal results, whilst impressive (multiple millions in incremental revenue), are almost inconsequential.

It is our proven hypothesis that takes centre stage for us.

The perfect blend of capability, insight and process used to drive personalisation and relevance. With the ‘new normal’ changing on a weekly basis agility is the new ‘secret sauce’ for marketing, as this campaign proves. 

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