Digital has greatly improved the shopping experience with quality-of-life improvements like free shipping and advanced personalization. At the same time, the drive for online innovation led by industry giants has been tough for many retailers to keep up with. But two retail industry events in New York this week painted a rosy picture an industry re-energized and well-equipped build meaningful, new connections with consumers through tech: New York Retail Innovation Week this week, which gathered together leadership from top retail brands and their innovation partners, and the NRF 2020 Vision conference.

MediaMonks participated in PSFK’s event, hosting a panel session in our New York office. Focused on in-store experiential retail, the panel featured Russell Kahn (VP of Retail, PUMA North America) and Alissa Allen (VP Group Director of Insights and Strategy, The Integer Group), and was moderated by our office’s Managing Director, Jason Prohaska.

Because just over a third of retail sales are influenced by digital, it will be increasingly important for retailers to understand how to trace the journey from online to off—or totally blur the boundary between those two states. As new technologies emerge (like 5G, which allows for in-store VR and AR demonstrations with zero latency), retailers will become even better-equipped to connect with their consumers.

So even though digital technology has put pressure on retailers, Allen reminds us that “Diamonds are formed under pressure.” That sense of energy, excitement and desire to reinvent the wheel is palpable in the retail today, ushering an optimistic vision of the industry’s tech-infused future.

Topics of the week ranged from purpose and intention to how retailers can offer unforgettable experiences by leveraging tech. To that point, YourStudio’s Co-Founder and Creative Director Howard Sullivan eloquently said before speaking at NYRIW, “We’re moving into an era of selling emotions and feelings, not things.” The good news: retail is the perfect stage to grant these experiences to consumers.

Retail’s Renewed Purpose

Retail faces challenges at all sides: there’s fierce competition from direct-to-consumer brands, a need to play catch-up with disruptive ecommerce giants and the increasing imperative to connect with the consumer through content and personalization at scale. A great place to begin thinking about retail’s future amidst each of these challenges is to ask why retail continues to be relevant today.

The answer? Retail offers an environment to instill loyalty by building meaningful connections that go beyond a simple transaction. According to PSFK’s Future Of Retail 2020: Retail As Personal Utility report, “73% [of consumers] are interested in shopping at a store that offers other useful services besides selling products.” This is the philosophy behind the opening of PUMA’s first flagship store in the US, which opened on Fifth Avenue in August last year.

At our NYRIW panel, Puma’s Russell Kahn mentioned how the store’s customization studio delivered on that promise by providing a personalized service to consumers, while keeping the space fresh with new partners and unique experiences (like bedazzling your new or old shoes with Swarovski crystals). “People want experiences, not products,” he said. “If they want products, they can go to Amazon. We thought about what reasons bring people to the store, and what that experience can be.”

The Rise of Experiential

Speaking of experiences, both Kahn and Integer Group’s Alissa Allen discussed the rising role of experiential retail. We’ve worked with both on high-profile experiential projects; PUMA’s store features a state-of-the-art F1 racing simulator on par with those used by real racers. And in collaboration with The Collective (part of The Integer Group) and AT&T, we built the Batman Experience, a large-scale interactive exhibition that includes an immersive virtual reality skydiving experience.

While the Batman Experience was one of the most buzzworthy exhibits at San Diego Comic-Con last year, the project began from humble roots. “We had the most boring brief ever: sell more fiber optic cable,” Allen told the panel audience. Admittedly, selling tech can be tough—so The Collective started by considering who buys fiber optic and why.

“Fiber optic is important for gamers and is even a deciding factor in where they choose to live,” she said. Suddenly, everything clicked: with AT&T having recently acquired the rights to Warner Bros. and DC Comics’ Batman IP, The Collective could showcase the strength of AT&T’s fiber optic product while delivering strong relevance to its audience. “Batman is a superhero powered by tech,” Allen said. “AT&T powers the tech that’s in the background of everything we do. So how can we take that and give consumers the feeling of having superpowers?” By going into a wind tunnel, strapping on a VR headset and gliding through a virtual Gotham City, of course.

Paying Attention to Intention

The discussion above shows how critical customer intention has become in the retail experience—whether online or off. At NRF this week, Amy Eschliman (SVP Client Engagement, Sephora) discussed how the retailer’s social content is built to support a transition from the news feed to a check-out button. Still, “In beauty, people have to deal with the products in person—there’s no other way,” she said. “So we needed to drive traffic into the stores.”

The challenge, then, is getting into the consumer’s mindset, wherever they operate: understanding what they want to achieve and how to position the brand to meet those needs. In Allen’s work with AT&T, she thinks of each store as a theater. “Every person goes into that theater with purpose and intention.” Kevin Plank, Executive Chairman and Brand Chief at Under Armour, made a similar point on stage at NRF. “When a consumer walks into a retail store, there’s two things they need to understand: what’s your personality, and what’s your point of view?”

The PUMA store manages these concerns by “[placing] the biggest representations of the brand around the store, so the consumer can choose which to spend time with and build a connection.” Visitors can explore the multifaceted brand through several lenses, perhaps based on their favorite sport, for example. Measuring time spent with any of those experiences and displays is key for understanding each one’s impact and influence. “The biggest learning is the consumer journey,” said Kahn. “Tracking the user journey through the store has been invaluable.”

While traditional advertising was once the go-to strategy for driving awareness and large reach, the one-size-fits-all approach to creative is no longer effective for maintaining a close relationship with today’s digital audience. Because consumers crave personalization and relevance, brands that are truly customer-focused realize the need to tailor their content for specific formats and channels in which they engage.

Look at it this way: just a single piece of creative limits your ability to impact a wide audience that comprises a diversity of needs, or to provide distinct cultural relevance across many markets. For example, a celebrity ambassador might be perfect for one market, but virtually unknown in another; alternatively, markets may celebrate holidays unique to their culture.

Accounting for these variables requires brands to rethink the way they produce content. Many brands are still quick to implement a project-based approach that can result in inefficiencies to rework, transform and adapt—sometimes ending up with a disarray of many vendors, disconnected campaigns and an inconsistent consumer experience. But even those that have already begun with a traditional “big idea” can extend its value by adapting it into a fit-for-format digital campaign without simply cutting things down.

Instead, a more integrated approach begins by pulling together strategy, media planning and creative ideation from the start, aligning brand and partner on the same page. This empowers both teams to produce versatile, format-ready deliverables capable of accomplishing each campaign goal with just a few shoots done in a week or less, rather than scheduling several shoots a month or getting bungled up in rework.

Format-ready digital content also gives brands the opportunity to learn what type of messaging is most effective for their audience. “The outcome is much more measurable,” says Brett Stiller, Creative Monk at MediaMonks. “The brand can see what’s most effective.” These learnings can be applied to tweaking the assets the brand already has, or can inform the next campaign to make it even stronger.

Iterating the Fit-for-Format Story

Philadelphia Cream Cheese is well-known and deeply loved by many, but the product’s wide appeal and versatile reach means there’s a lot of ways to enjoy it; different countries each have their own favorite cream cheese-based snack, and while a bagel is a staple of American breakfasts, it just won’t cut it in England. Aiming to provide a mouth-watering message, Philadelphia needed a partner capable of adapting a selection of hero TVC scripts that could appeal to a variety of regional appetites.

Putting its extensive global knowledge to the test, the team was able to deliver over 900 assets from one week of shooting, enabling the brand to broadcast just 14 weeks after briefing. We achieved this by taking careful consideration of the many touchpoints that exist along the consumer journey—aiming not just to build awareness, but to direct consumers through the purchase funnel and across digital platforms. For this purpose, it’s important that a creative partner truly understands user behaviors for each format and is able to help your brand influence key decision moments for consumers.

Brands can take a similar approach to expanding their traditional campaigns into digital. Too often, the tactic that some brands use is cutting down their existing creative and trying to force it within the different social formats. But when Calvin Klein sought to expand the reach of a traditional campaign for their Eternity for Men fragrance, they knew they could provide a more meaningful and authentic message to consumers by building a social campaign from scratch, with thematic ties to the original creative.

This also offered an opportunity to refresh the brand, ensuring the digital campaign’s extension in reach would make an impact. “It nodded to the brand, but wasn’t fully ‘Eternity’ as you’ve known it before,” said Stiller. “Part of the work was updating that ethos, aesthetic and tone—extracting the stories from it and letting it reach into the right space.”

For example, while the original TVC focused on Jake Gyllenhaal, the digital one followed influencers as they reflect on the different roles they play in their lives, and how each affects their concept of masculinity. “The influencers are easier to identify with, as their lives are more attainable than a traditional celebrity,” said Sara Tunstall, Senior Content Producer at MediaMonks, “While celebrity fits the context of a TVC well, this approach is more natural to social.” Focused on what makes each subject unique, the campaign offers several opportunities for audiences to connect.

Planning and Trust are Key

The integrated production method can help brands extend the value of their core message and combine reach with added relevance, but the hyper-efficient process succeeds best when campaign needs and KPIs are carefully planned out at the start. Trust is key for any partnership, and careful communication and planning ensures that the creative team has the freedom to adapt a message in all the ways that make sense for the channels in which it lives, while easing any anxieties the brand may have.

For example, we understand that brands may feel overwhelmed by the need to review the high volume of assets made available with integrated production, which is why we’ve made tools in the past to streamline that process for them. If the brand is already well aware of elements or messaging that resonates best with their audiences through iterative testing, establishing those insights early on can ease the need for rework.

Integrated production offers a great way for brands to meaningfully expand their ideas and drive impact. Breaking down the “big idea” offers several possibilities to relate to audiences no matter their interests or channel of choice, helping to augment a brand’s goal to extend reach. With strong collaboration and trust between parties, brands can enjoy a much more efficient process for producing content that provides value to their audiences and achieves a faster time to market.