Selfridges London Beauty Hall will host a special Blackjack-staffed gift-wrapping service to customers purchasing SUQQU lipsticks for Valentine’s Day. This service coincides with the launch of the SS20 Collection that includes a range of new lipstick shades, which can be individually gift boxed and finished off with a personalised tag and ribbon.

Dena Weal, Marketing Manager for SUQQU, says: “The launch of our new lipstick shades from the SS20 Collections come at a time of year when many will be thinking about dressing up for date nights. It’s also a time for celebrating female friendships with the increasingly popular alternate ‘Galentine’s Day’. This is a peak time for lip product purchasing, as well as gifting, so we wanted to offer our customers an extra special finishing touch. Last month’s personalised gifting in honour of Chinese New Year was so well received that we wanted to partner again with Blackjack to bring this idea to life.”

Simran Sidhu, Account Manager at Blackjack Promotions, adds: “Once again we were excited to work with SUQQU in one of the Capital’s key shopping destinations on a campaign with real heart! Valentine’s Day is big business for the beauty industry, which of course means it’s also an opportunity for brands to stand out by offering something with a human touch. Personalised gifting – from a beautifully handwritten gift tag to a professionally tied bow that hints at the contents, show thought and consideration. We love helping brands connect with their customers in this way.”

The personalised gift-wrapping service will be available on the SUQQU counter in London’s Selfridges Beauty Hall in time for Valentine’s Day – 7th, 8th, 13th and 14th February (3-7pm).

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Fiona Rayner, Head of Experiential and International Operations at Blackjack Promotions, questions the relevance of Travel Retail in the 21st century and how it can become a more engaging experience to satisfy the needs of consumers.

According to a report from Boston Consulting Group delivered at the Tax Free World Association (TFWA) Asia Pacific Conference in Singapore in May 2019, the travel retail market has tripled in size since 2002. However, the rate at which passengers are spending has slowed the past five years. More people flying, but the amount they spend in Duty Free stores is not keeping pace. Travel retail needs to become more relevant to travellers.

If travel retail wants to continue to grow at a reasonable rate, it needs to face the key question which Alain Maingreaud, President, Tax Free World Association, posed to the audience at TFWA Asia Pacific Exhibition and Conference in his keynote address opening proceedings on Day One, “Are we relevant and how can we become more relevant?”

As Maingreaud eloquently explained, Duty Free no longer has a price benefit over high street and online stores. Nor is convenience a driver for Duty Free shopping. After all, people don’t go to an airport purely to shop, they go to fly; the shopping is an added activity.

It’s not how special Duty Free stores are because shoppers are telling us that duty free stores look the same around the world.

Could it be sense of place? Perhaps, Maingreaud says. But if we’re to rely on sense of place, we need to put more creativity into it.

What about the ‘captive audience?’ He made it clear that he doesn’t like that term – and let’s face it, nor will the travellers we want to entice into our retail outlets!

So the answer, he said, has to be in the whole experience – delivering great products, at a competitive price, in a unique environment with staff who make you feel special.

I couldn’t agree with him more on this last point – as he went on to say, human beings make the difference between a disappointing retail experience and an exciting one.

So the mission of all of us who want to see the travel retail industry continue to thrive has to be all about supporting frontline staff to enable them to deliver the very best and most relevant experiences to passengers.

It was convenient that the conference was held in Singapore because it meant that we got to see the new Changi Jewel Airport. This has to be one of the most breath-taking travel hubs in the world, which also delivers a truly 21^st century travel retail experience.

In fact, there is a lot that Western airports, retailers and brands can learn from what’s happening in Asia.

Kate Ancketill, CEO of research agency GDR Creative Intelligence, suggested in her presentation that there is a new battle going on in the wider retail world (of which travel retail, as she put it, is an ‘idiosyncratic’ element’) between offering customers experience or convenience.

At least, that seems to be how the West views it, she said: experience and convenience in the West are not usually delivered together successfully. Things are either fun or quick, but not both.

But in Asia, things are different. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, talks about what he calls the ‘new retail’, where online and offline retail are seamlessly merged.

Ma has added ROBOT.He, a robot-staffed restaurant, to his HEMA online-offline restaurant chain. You pick your own lobster, it’s cooked to your liking and delivered to your table by a robot, all controlled by an app.

The idea behind HEMA/Freshippo is a chain of supermarkets which serve the local population within a three kilometre radius and which can deliver pretty much anything you want quickly and conveniently, all run via Alibaba’s app and its Alipay online payment system, which means they have detailed knowledge of the consumer and their habits.

There are some Western examples where experience and convenience come together; she cites the new FICO Eataly ‘theme park’ in Bologna which is one million square feet, a unique food-related experience, contrasted with the Amazon physical store model of picking up a product, scanning your product and leaving.

Big consumer brands like Apple and Nike are beginning to experiment with pulling the two disparate elements together; for example, the Nike House of Innovation on New York’s 5^th Avenue, which some experts call the most exciting experiential store outside of China. It’s a 68,000 square foot store with two maker studios, customisation areas, one-to-one appointments with experts, collection lockers, an app system and instant checkout. Scan a mannequin code to find the items or request for staff to come and find you for assistance.

Or take Walmart’s Sam’s Club Now, a test store which is playing with the idea of turning shopping into a ‘virtual treasure hunt’ with interactive shelf edge ticketing driving Augmented Reality.

But this kind of approach just isn’t reflected in Travel Retail at least not in the West, where it tends to be more consistent and to display similar product assortments over longer periods , rather than reacting dynamically to data collected from shoppers in real time.

Ancketill’s concluded that customer expectations, which are set beyond the terminal, are transformed by the the New Retail, together with the wider retail eco-system. She believes that there is need for collaboration and use of the imagination for the Travel Retail to catch up with the new ‘retail-ers’ , surprise and delight the customers.

I think the key takeaways from these two very powerful presentations from Maingreaud and Ancketill were that Travel Retail has to become more relevant, both to the travelling consumer and also to the latest developments in the wider 21^st century retail industry, and that it has to offer a dynamic and constantly engaging experience.

To find out more about Blackjack Promotions, get in touch with Fiona Rayner at Fiona.Rayner@abm.com

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Blackjack Promotions, the staffing, travel retail and experiential marketing specialist, is taking part in a Queen Elizabeth Foundation (QEF) ‘Apprentice’ Challenge as part of an ongoing charity partnership between its parent company, OmniServ, and Queen Elizabeth’s Foundation for Disabled People (QEF).

The ‘QEF Apprentice Challenge’ will see a number of Blackjack’s senior team members put through their paces to try and sell the highest number of goods across a number of QEF charity shops around Surrey.

For the challenge, six teams have been selected from within OmniServ and Blackjack Promotions, to compete in the challenge. In the style of the popular television show, The Apprentice, team members will take over a number of QEF charity shops for two hours over a period of six days, November 1st and 4th-8th. During this time, they can re-merchandise, change, promote, or do whatever they need to do to sell as much as they can.

Team’s will be judged on who sells the most during those two hours; the team who have created the best window display (as voted by the general public); and the team that signs up the most gift aiders.

Antony Marke, Group Managing Director at Omniserv, said:“At Blackjack, we pride ourselves in being experts in creating outstanding retail experiences that leave a lasting impression with customers. It will be interesting to see how our team members fare when put to the test in the ‘QEF Apprentice Challenge’ and it’s great to see so many of our Blackjack team members getting on board with this exciting charity fundraising event to raise money for a great cause. I’m looking forward to taking on the Lord Sugar role – but should make very clear that it’s all in the name of fun and, at the end of the day, no one will be getting fired!”

The six teams, each named after one of ABM’s core values, will cover the following QEF charity shop locations across Surrey:

1. Team Collaboration: Led by Fiona Rayner, Head of Experiential & International Operations for Blackjack Promotions at 134 Walton Road, East Molesey on 1^stNovember 2019
2. Team Integrity: Led by Paul Williams, Head of Business Development for OmniServ at 6 North Parade, Chessington on 4^thNovember 2019
3. Team Respect: Led by Leanne Nutter, Head of Travel Retail for Blackjack Promotions at 33-35 High Street, Leatherhead on 5^thNovember 2019
4. Team Innovation: Led by Nikki Fisher, Head of Staffing for Blackjack Promotions at 96 High Street, Banstead on 6^thNovember 2019
5. Team Trust: Led by Steve Foran, Customer Service Manager for OmniServ at 8 Craddock Avenue, Ashtead on 7^thNovember 2019
6. Team Excellence: Led by Rob Stevanonic, Senior Commercial Manager for OmniServ at 99 Central Road, Worcester Park on 8^thNovember 2019

QEF is a national disability charity with more than 80 years’ experience of developing innovative services which support people with disabilities to increase their independence and achieve their goals in life, including accessing aviation. The charity works with over 5,000 children and adults every year with physical or learning disabilities or acquired brain injuries.

The initiative is part of an ongoing charity partnership with QEF, announced at the beginning of 2019, whereby OmniServ and its travel retail division Blackjack Promotions pledged to support QEF as part of its continued commitment to making air travel accessible for everyone.

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Fiona Rayner, Head of Experiential & International Operations at Blackjack Promotions, shares how Duty Free can carefully combine humanity and technology to directly engage passengers

Airport Duty Free is the envy of the rest of the retail world, delivering growing profits from relatively small outlets and apparently resisting the threat of e-commerce.

Of course, there are advantages to the airport environment; a captive audience with money to spend and time to kill, for a start. But even air travellers can get bored with a retail offering that stays the same and fails to reflect changes in consumer taste and in retail engagement.

Sometimes, even the best retailers and brands can get a bit complacent and even lazy. Plus, they are just as vulnerable as the consumers they serve to the siren lure of the ‘Next Big Thing.’

Take digital, for example. There’s lots of tech being rolled out in the Duty Free space. Some of it is truly groundbreaking, but much of it is just more of the same.

We see examples across travel retail of what is purely ‘tech for the sake of tech’ – someone places an iPad on a promotion, lets consumers click a few buttons to indicate what their preference is, and the digital aspect of a promotion is complete – just a tick box exercise.

I think mechanics like this need to go to a new level. I was at Jewel Changi Airport recently for the Tax Free World Association (TFWA) Asia Pacific Exhibition and Conference. They’d given the iPad data collector an extra twist. They had a little robot; not a real robot, but one of those ‘telepresence’ devices where you position an iPad and a digital screen on a vaguely anthropomorphic body. But it works: people like interacting with something new, and these robots can be very likeable.

However, cuteness alone isn’t enough; relevance is key. If it’s not relevant to the individual, then it’s just a tablet asking questions. It has a passing suggestion of personalisation, but it’s not real personalisation, it’s just form-filling. At the end of the day, it’s just another way of collecting data from consumers.

Technology should be used not simply as a passive receptor, but as a communicator that uses data to engage consumers with relevant content that actually enriches and improves the customer experience.

There is support for this viewpoint, ironically, from a new report by e-commerce specialists Attraqt, entitled Luxury Retail’s Digital Dilemma – How To Inject The ‘Wow’ Into ‘Buy Now’.

Although the report’s over-riding objective is to get luxury brands to spend on e-commerce, its authors warn, interestingly, against an over-reliance on AI and data-driven websites.

The report says: “focusing on automation alone will hamper a luxury brand’s ability to create rich discovery experiences. High end retail experiences will thrive on the ability to over-ride automation with human merchandising creativity – for instance the opportunity to respond to ‘in the moment’ trends and events.”

Now, they aren’t talking about physical high-end stores; they are talking about effectively online moderators who inject some humanity into a website’s otherwise cold and analytical delivery of results based just on data.

But the point the report makes is just as valid when you apply it to Duty Free outlets and how luxury brands communicate with shoppers in the physical airport space. There is indeed a need to “create rich discovery experiences”, both on-and off-line.

In a world of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and where people feel bombarded with marketing messages and demands for their data, brands and retailers need to figure out how to gain trust from passengers, so they are happy to give you more information that can be used to deliver a more tailored, personal and relevant experience. This will both drive sales and boost loyalty.

There’s also the challenge of understanding the data that consumers are giving you and turning it into real, actionable insights. Tech, right now, is great at capturing raw data; but real people, whether Brand Ambassadors or retail staff, don’t just provide data, they add nuance, context and interpretation. This is why the human touch retail remains vital, regardless of technology.

Well-trained retail assistants and brand ambassadors engage directly with passengers. They are the eyes and ears of brands and retailers on the shop floor in the airport space. They report back what customers are telling them about a brand or a retailer, how they feel about offers, and their personal reactions to what they are being told, shown and asked to pay for.

Real people are also much better than robots or tablets at understanding the subtleties of human interactions and human emotion. That’s why technology, no matter how sophisticated or intelligent, should only play a supporting role to real people in retail. It can liberate them from behind counters; analyse customer data, turning it into key insight they can use to deliver a better-informed service; provide automation for repetitive tasks so they can dedicate more time to customer engagement. But it should not and will not ever replace the human touch.

Airports are buzzing places, full of human energy and emotion. We have to make sure that this isn’t thrown away in a headlong rush to embrace new technology. With increasing competition and the rise of ecommerce, it’s important for real world retail to be more experiential than ever before. Carefully combining humanity and technology holds the key.

To find out more about Blackjack Promotions, get in touch with Fiona.Rayner@abm.com

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For the second year running Vogue House will be opening its doors for Five Days of Vogue Beauty – a programme of experiential and immersive events for Vogue Beauty fans.

Spanning five days from Sunday 8th to Thursday 12th September, the boardrooms in Vogue House will be taken over by the Vogue Beauty department, in partnership with a coterie of incredible brands, to host a series of beauty-dedicated panel talks and experiences.

Each day will give access-all-areas insight into the inner workings of the Vogue beauty team, along with their special guests, through expert panels, masterclasses and demos. During your session you will also be able to discover and sample some of the very best products that the beauty industry has to offer and no matter which session you attend, you will receive a selection of products from all of our 5 Days partner brands worth over £150: Whether you attend one day, or attend them all, Team Vogue look forward to welcoming you.

The experience will include:

• Marcia Kilgore founder of Beauty Pie will share talks on building a brand and the future of beauty luxury products
• Laura Mercier Cosmetics will be sharing make-up tips and advice with their masterclasses
• Hairstylist, Larry King will showcase Dyson’s Airwrap Styler and Supersonic Hairdryer showing different hair trends
• Make-up artist Nikki Wolff will demonstrate how to make the most of luxury beauty brand, Becca Cosmetics
• Garnier will host a masterclass on environmentally conscious skincare routines.

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Fiona Rayner (née Tindall) has been promoted to a new role within Blackjack Promotions, to align with the company’s international expansion plans, having taken on the new role of Head of Experiential & International Operations.

The announcement comes following the recent launch of a new joint venture for Blackjack in the Middle East, partnering with leading Emirati people solutions company Dulsco to deliver 21st century staffing and experiential solutions for retailers and brands targeting both affluent Middle Eastern consumers and world travellers who pass through the region’s airports. It also marks a significant step up for expanding Blackjack’s travel retail presence in Ireland.

Rayner joined Blackjack Promotions in 2016 as an Account Director from World Duty Free where she was Customer Service Manager at Heathrow Terminal 5. Within just one year of joining, she was elevated to the newly-created role of Head of Domestic Retail, which saw her oversee the growth of Blackjack’s retail division.

In her new role as Head of Experiential & International Operations, Rayner will split her time between Blackjack’s London Heathrow headquarters, Dublin and Dubai. She will be focused on supporting the development of Travel Retail and Domestic accounts across Ireland, driving growth and operational efficiencies in the MENA region, alongside aligning capabilities with the UK operation.

“I am incredibly excited about the role and having spent time in both Dubai and Dublin in recent months, I am confident that we can grow and develop the Blackjack brand outside of the UK market,” said Rayner. “Aligning our creative capabilities with the UK is going to elevate our position in these markets and I am thrilled to lead this with the support of my team.”

Commenting on the new role, Jason Miles, Managing Director for Blackjack Promotions, said: “Blackjack has expanded into new and exciting markets in recent years. Positioning Fiona in this role enables us to extend our capabilities outside of the UK and enhance our offering even further to offer clients a range of creative brand and customer experience solutions.”

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