Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Consumers want more from brick-and-mortar stores than they can get online, where shopping is faster, easier and often cheaper, members of a panel on retail. They're looking for human interaction, said Rachel Shechtman, founder of Story, a boutique in Chelsea. "The future of retail is about entertainment and community," she said. "It's really about the surprise and delight factor."

Her shop, Story, experiments with retail as a media channel, and is managed like a magazine, according to Ms. Shechtman. It has sponsorships, like magazines have ads, and it's completely redone every few weeks with new products and designs. Most of the shop, Ms. Shechtman says, is pure experience, with a smaller portion where customers can shop....

...Millions are spent on content creation and propagation across many channels and media. Multi-channel marketing concepts can be fitted to this alternate use case by helping brand marketers understand the contribution of content investments to an engaged audience of individual consumers. It’s like placing iBeacons on branded content such that marketing spend can be optimized around the messaging that connects best with consumers. Metrics such as open rates and website visitor dwell times become indicators of content quality comparable on a relative basis.It takes a blend of informed creative brilliance and technology enablement to pull this off – key is informed.

To these ends, it’s essential to reign in the insights digital channels capture to fuel a profile of individual consumers that lives, grows, and evolves just like the person it describes. These insights help both agencies and brand marketers inform brand storytelling with knowledge of their consumers beyond superficial characteristics. In this way, you could say consumers help write the story....

Consumers today conduct a great deal of research about the products they are buying and brands are being asked to fulfill a multitude of informational needs.

Argos, a UK-based consumer goods and ecommerce retailer, is exceptional in that they maintain an active presence operating across a large range of touchpoints, both digitally and via traditional media. This case study takes a close look at how Argos reaches, influences, and engages consumers as they go through their purchase journeys....