Retail campaigns are measured almost everywhere by reach and almost nowhere by the thing they exist for. A campaign in retail has one job: that more people walk onto the floor, and that they arrive at a moment when somebody is there for them. Everything else is preparation.
- Retail campaigns fail on frequency, not on the idea.
- Most of it gets lost between the campaign and the floor.
- Five levers decide the way into the store.
- Frequency can be measured, effect only in part.
Table of contents
Why retail campaigns fail on frequency
The mistake starts with the objective. In most businesses retail campaigns are briefed like brand campaigns and judged like promotions. What comes out does too little for either. The campaign is too beautiful to create an occasion and too loud to carry a position. I worked that way myself for a long time, because the separation is inconvenient in the calendar.
The second cause is a handover problem. In many organisations a campaign ends with the media buy, and the floor finds out from the newsletter. Anyone who has stood in a store on a Saturday where the staff did not know the running campaign understands how expensive that gap is. Visibility creates expectation, and an expectation that is not met costs more than it brought in.
That retail is under pressure and gaining importance at the same time is by now well documented. The annual State of Fashion from McKinsey and the Business of Fashion has described the same movement across several editions: growth comes less often from new customers and more often from higher visit frequency among the ones already there. That is exactly what retail campaigns should pay into.
Five levers I use to plan retail campaigns
The five levers below are not a model, they are a sequence. They come out of campaigns that either produced frequency or did not.
- Occasion. Why should somebody come this week rather than in four weeks? Without a reason that carries a date, the campaign stays a reminder of the brand.
- Time window. When is the floor able to serve a rush well? Frequency at the wrong hour is not an opportunity, it is a burden.
- Local truth. What is true at this location that is not true everywhere? A campaign that runs identically in every city is convenient and weak.
- Staff. Do the people on the floor know what was promised outside? That question decides more than any media plan.
- Return. What happens after the visit? A campaign without a second occasion is a single event rather than a build.
The sequence matters because it reverses the usual process. Planning normally starts with the image and ends at the floor. For retail campaigns it should start at the floor and end with the image. How I design the floor itself and what I judge it by I have described in retail experience design. This piece picks up where the floor already exists and needs visitors.
I learned the most from the fourth lever. Some years ago we began explaining the campaign to the stores a week before launch, not as a document but in a short conversation with the people responsible. The effort was modest and the effect was clear. The same campaign ran visibly better in the houses that had talked it through first, without a single euro being spent differently. Since then I do not consider retail campaigns planned until that conversation is in the calendar.
What gets lost between campaign and floor
I once followed a well made campaign through a whole season as it got quieter in execution. At head office the thought was clear. In the region it became a wall with a poster. In the store it became a table with three pieces on it that did not belong together. Nobody did anything wrong, and still nothing was left at the end of what had made the campaign worth doing.
Since then I plan retail campaigns backwards. The first draft is not the picture but a description of what a person should see and hear on a Tuesday afternoon in a mid-sized store. If that paragraph cannot be written, the campaign is not finished being thought through. It sounds banal, and it has sorted out more ideas for me than any debate about creative quality.
The third point concerns volume. Too many parallel occasions cancel each other out. A floor can tell one story well, two stories adequately, and three not at all. Anyone who does not cap the number of simultaneous campaigns gets a floor that looks busy and says nothing. That is the quiet reason why so many retail campaigns end without a visible effect.
What can actually be measured about frequency
Frequency is one of the few quantities in marketing that can be collected cleanly, and it is still rarely read cleanly. Visitor numbers alone say little about whether retail campaigns worked. It gets interesting in ratios: visits to passers-by, purchases to visits, basket to purchase, return visit within eight weeks. Those four ratios together show whether a campaign brought in people who also wanted to stay.
What matters is the comparison against a location without a campaign. Without a control you are measuring weather, school holidays and high street position. One year we held an activity to be strong until somebody put the comparison cities next to it. The uplift there was almost the same. Since then every evaluation of retail campaigns includes at least one location where nothing happened. It is inconvenient in planning and it protects against expensive conclusions.
Where retail campaigns run into limits
There are two cases in which I advise against large activities. The first is a floor that cannot carry the rush. Understaffing and a full stockroom are not campaign problems, but a campaign makes both visible. The second case is a range with no reason to come back. A brand without a second story pulls people in once and uses up the attention it would have needed later.
Retail campaigns are strongest where something exists that can only happen on the floor. A fitting, a repair, an alteration, a person who explains something that is only asserted online. Occasions like that do not look spectacular, but they produce exactly the return that later looks like brand strength. They also have the advantage of being impossible to copy, because they sit with people rather than with a format. A competitor can take over an image. A floor that works together cannot be taken over.
In the end retail campaigns are a question of alignment rather than creation. They are decided by whether marketing, floor and merchandise mean the same week when they talk about a campaign. Where that works, visibility turns into visits. Where it does not, you are left with a good picture and a floor that never heard about it.
Which claims are still permissible on the floor at all I have described in EmpCo directive.