Fiona Strong, Managing Director at Ark-H Handling, explores how Black Friday can be both a blessing and a curse for retailers and fulfilment houses.

Introduced from the USA several years ago, the Black Friday phenomenon, like so many American imports, has had positive and negative effects on the UK market in almost equal measure.

Initially the new concept in sales promotion led to a massive rise in on-line sales, as internet retailers rushed to capitalise on this frenzy of armchair bargain-hunting.  Sales spiked, web-sites crashed and the shopping world went Black Friday mad. The high-street trembled as the statistics for year-on-year on-line shopping sales shot through the roof and the world of fulfilment and distribution was caught on the hop.

As time has gone by the Black Friday effect has begun to diminish somewhat, although this is still the busiest period for sales, both on-line and on the high street. Designed to ‘kick-off’ the holiday season (Thanksgiving) in the US, Black Friday has, to a marked extent, become the starting pistol for pre-Christmas sales in the UK.

Mainstream retail has caught up with on-line, with stores building television campaigns designed to capture both on-line and footfall sales. Shoppers looking for bargains still flock to find the best deals, in the ether or on the pavement, but the one-day pressure has eased.  Many retailers have sought to up-stage the Black Friday event with earlier offer days with Amazon Prime day being a ‘prime’ example.

The on-line shopping bonanza continues to grow and flourish and it is now expected that sales will rise and rise. It is the rush to discount that has slowed slightly, with retailers of all descriptions recognising that this is more of a rush to bottom than a race to the top. The benefits to consumers remain and special deals abound but no longer in the staggering proportions of a few years ago.

On-line fulfilment services too have adjusted to meet demand and it is no longer so difficult for companies to fulfil the peak in demand. Gone are the days when neither websites nor warehouses could cope with the Black Friday effect.

Predictions for 2018 suggest that the average Brit will spend about £220 on Black Friday. This is significantly less than last year but it is also predicted that many more people will take part. So the overall spend on the Black Friday weekend will still probably top out at over 7 billion pounds.

The Black Friday phenomenon is both a blessing and a curse for retailers and fulfilment houses alike but, given the need for them to keep the customers satisfied and sales rising now that everyone has got the hang of the idea, on aggregate they are probably better off with it than without it.

Ark-H Handling has over 28 years of proven expertise in delivering a comprehensive range of handling & fulfilment solutions. They provide unparalleled levels of service and expertise delivered through industry leading systems & facilities, combined with outstanding staff and a commitment to quality.

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It may be roasting outside, but for marketers, Christmas is just around the corner. Maddie Cullen of Ready Agency provides some tips on targeting consumers during the festive period

Christmas. The busiest time of year for marketers. But it doesn’t start as the nights are drawing in; most people are already planning ahead for the festive season.

Christmas is a time for increased sales, but also for increased competition. Brands fight tooth and nail to be one of the items wrapped up in a bow, stuffed in a stocking or served up for Christmas treats.

Here are a few ways brands can make sure they’re the ones under the Christmas tree this year.

Even Rudolf has one

It should come as no surprise that mobile is the top focus for brands this year. People are increasingly having ‘micro moments’, which are the quick searches and checks on their phones, giving consumers instant information at the swipe of a finger.

It’s these minutes/seconds that brands should be slotting themselves into. If a brand can be a solution to a mobile user’s query, that can be the first step on the journey to purchase.

In the last few years 42% of people planned to do all of their Christmas shopping on mobile. Brands should make sure they’ve optimised for mobile and their site is user-friendly, otherwise a busy Christmas shopper could give up and try somewhere else.

However, it’s good news for those brands that do capture the attention of an eager shopper. Research shows that people are happiest online when shopping! So customers are going to be in a good mood and therefore likely to spend more and treat themselves or others.

But it’s not just during the lead up to Christmas that brands need to be on phones. Christmas Day is actually one of the busiest mobile shopping days of the year. People may have cash burning a hole in their pockets, or a bad present to replace, but either way, they’re actively buying on Christmas day.

Like Father Christmas, be everywhere

But not everyone is doing all of their shopping on mobile – for some people the journey goes on for much longer than that.

More and more consumers are researching reviews, images and videos before buying gifts. This can take them from a product website to their Facebook chat to a celebrities Instagram account and anywhere else they can find.

People increasingly start an order in one place and finish it at another, whether that’s changing from browser to app or from desktop to phone. Omnichannel should be the word on every brand’s lips this year.

Consumers are also splitting up their shopping techniques. Some people research online and buy in-store, and some research in-store and buy online. Brands must make sure that they can accommodate both types by making it easy to buy and providing essential information at every touchpoint. Whether this is on their website or social media or on the packaging, make sure that consumers have no excuse to put the product back on the shelf! (Digital or otherwise).

In the festive season people are out and about more. Socialising takes over sitting in front of the TV or browsing on a laptop – but they’re still on their phone. This is what connects all the research consumers are doing in-store and online.

The success of the strategy can be seen when brands that aren’t embracing an omnichannel approach like Next are failing to engage. Having a nice shop front means very little if your online presence is non-existent. Like consumers, be connected.

You don’t know The Ice Queen?

If there’s one thing we’ve learn from the last year, it’s that influencers aren’t going away anytime soon.

In the winter months they have all the same benefits as usual but amplified. Christmas is the perfect time of year for influencers because people are ready to be, well, influenced. Consumers are constantly on the lookout for inspiration for gifts, decorations, food and anything they can buy to make this Christmas ‘the best one yet’.

Influencers are also great at breaking through the noise and reaching consumers that otherwise wouldn’t be aware of what a brand is selling. This is especially important at the most competitive time of the year!

One in five YouTube views are instigated by a search. This means that those viewers have a ‘lean-in’ mindset. They’re the perfect people to reach with YT pre-roll and brand partnerships. A lot of these people are actively looking for information. A carefully selected influencer can start that journey to purchase for them.

Amazon used influencers well with their Prime campaign last year. They teamed up with a few YouTubers to show how useful the service can be in the lead up to the big day. Ingrid Nilsen assembled a box of goodies for her best friend and her dog and Alex Wassabi collected gifts for his girlfriend. Each of the influencers did something personal and real and showed their millions of followers why Amazon Prime works so well, especially when Christmas shopping.

Utilising content creators generates an added advantage for those brands that do it well at Christmas.

Let’s serve dessert before mains

This year, be different.

John Lewis have set a standard for Christmas advertising to create an emotional, entertaining story. The majority of major supermarkets follow suit. But unless the copycats have a clear enough branding, people will just associate the memory of an emotional ad with John Lewis. The brands that break the mould this year will capture much more attention. Amazon’s ad last year that focused on products actually rated higher for likability than the John Lewis monster story.

That isn’t to say don’t be emotional. Christmas celebrations are rooted in feelings. Brands that lose sight of this risk offending people – as Poundland has learnt from their Elf behaving badly campaign. You can joke about Christmas but don’t go too far as to make a mockery of it. Most people love and enjoy celebrating the holiday and don’t want that feeling dragged through the dirt.

A brand that did this well was H&M, with its ad directed by Wes Anderson. It told an emotional story, but still featured a cast of characters decked out in H&M attire. The story was fun, but the brand message was clear enough that when people thought back, there wasn’t any mistaking the brand.

But remember, what worked one year isn’t guaranteed to succeed the next. People and trends change. Christmas is close to the New Year and summing up the finished year – customers want familiarity, but they want something exciting too. (As we all know from the disappointment of opening up a pair of socks again – thanks grandma!)

Brands need to keep a strong presence online but shouldn’t lack in traditional areas either. At Christmas, every touchpoint counts. Techniques that work at other times of the year, like influencers, still work at Christmas. The difference is, everything needs to be rooted in emotion.

Even if some people eat Christmas dinner after presents, we’re all still human.

Maddie Cullen is Marketing Assistant at Ready, a multi-disciplined creative agency specialising in breakthrough promotional and tactical marketing campaigns. Clients include Soap & Glory, Kiddylicious, Burt’s Bees and Molton Brown.

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Discover Delicious, an organisation dedicated to promoting the food and flavour of Wales, is launching a new consumer-facing online marketplace, DiscoverDelicious.Wales, which celebrates Wales’ best loved producers and the products that have made them local foodie favourites.

The integrated consumer launch campaign for the marketplace was developed by Bath-based AgencyUK. The activity includes TV advertising, PR, social media, experiential and brand activation. TV advertising broke this week. The launch follows a number of successful consumer test campaigns that have been underway since April 2018.

Discover Delicious is part funded by Welsh Government and is a partnership between Way Out Events and AgencyUK. The Discover Delicious brand, communications strategy and eCommerce site have been developed in collaboration, with AgencyUK’s in-house team leading on delivery.

Laura Pickup, founder of Discover Delicious says: “We’re proud of the fantastic food and drink in Wales and really excited to see this campaign promote the incredible products to a wider market. Our Discover Delicious team collectively bring over 20 years of experience in marketing Welsh produce and, with AgencyUK’s support, our mission is to bring Welsh flavours to consumers’ tables nationwide and put Welsh food on the map. We’re here to support producers from all corners of the country in that mission, amplifying their profile and products as part of a connected network that promotes the rich gastronomy of Wales.”

The site already features hundreds of products, but Discover Delicious is actively recruiting more producers to join its community.

Sammy Mansourpour, managing director of AgencyUK, adds: “We know we have a strong brand with huge potential and we can now look forward to amplifying the Discover Delicious story in 2018 through engaging content and compelling advertising campaigns. We’ll start with a TV, PR and Social Media campaign this June.”

The project has received funding through the Welsh Government Rural Communities – Rural Development Programme 2014-2020, which is funded by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development and the Welsh Government.

AgencyUK is an award-winning full service strategic digital, advertising and creative marketing communications agency based in Bristol, Bath and London.

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Quirky personalised gift company Harrow & Green, which usually sells its products via its own website or ecommerce sites such as Notonthehighstreet.com, is again opening a present personalisation pop-up in iconic department store Selfridges on London’s Oxford Street.

Shoppers searching for the perfect bespoke Christmas present for their loved ones will be able to enlist the help of a crew of elves provided by staffing specialists Blackjack Promotions.

Harrow & Green mainly sells through websites, offering a range of customisable personalised products which includes special Christmas stockings and sacks. However, last year, in the run-up to the festive period, it set up a special pop-up personalised gift boutique in Selfridges’ Christmas Shop, with Blackjack’s help.

That experiment proved so popular that Harrow & Green is doing it again this year, with its pop-up set open from early September. Blackjack has recruited and trained a team of four staff, who will be on hand to guide shoppers through the mysteries of Christmas wrapping and help them select personalised gifts for friends and family.

The brand ambassadors, wearing Harrow & Green-branded aprons, will also make the bespoke items, which can carry shopper-selected messaging, including children’s names and dates of birth.

Philip Taylor, who co-founded Harrow & Green with his wife Tanya, says: “Our Christmas pop-up in Selfridges offers the perfect opportunity for us to share our passion for all things beautiful. We’re inspired by modern typography, old-style fonts, and the way text can be combined with original design to produce high quality, great-looking personalised Christmas gifts, stockings and sacks. We need intelligent, engaging staff who share our passion for the beautiful and who can articulate our vision and our brand values – and Blackjack has already shown it’s more than capable of recruiting and training just the right people.”

Fiona Tindall, Head of Domestic Retail at Blackjack Promotions, says: “Blackjack needs fully-trained brand ambassadors who understand the brand inside out, can operate the printing process and embody the Harrow & Green charm. Fundamentally, it’s moving the relationship from being a purely transactional, product-based one to being an emotional, experiential one.”

The Harrow & Green Christmas pop-up will be open in Selfridges until December 24th, 2017.

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Generation Z shoppers (those aged from 15 to 24) are shop-happy and digitally-savvy consumers who are open to being influenced by retailers – but they also have high expectations of them.

They are more likely than the general shopping population to think that retailers consider their age group important, while half of them believe that retailers and brands understand their age group, compared with a third of the rest of shoppers.

Danielle Pinnington, Managing Director at research company Shoppercentric, which has published the new report, says: “Generation Z are a fascinating section of the shopper population. They’ve grown up in a truly connected world and are starting to access the kind of money that means they can flex their spending power. A lot has already been written about who they are as consumers, but there’s been no particular focus for those interested in shoppers. We wanted to take a closer look at what their expectations and needs are since they may not be today’s big spenders, but they could give a real pointer to where the future of retail lies… if we take the time to listen to them.”

Other findings of the report include:

• Generation Z are more likely to say that happiness runs deeper than material possessions alone: 34% strongly agree that they want to feel they are getting good experiences and that life isn’t all about what they own, versus 28% of older shoppers.
• Generation Z shop (instore/online) at least seven times a month (rising to eight times a month amongst the men in this age group). For them, going to physical shops and malls is as much a social pursuit as it is about buying things: 52% of Generation Z said that going out shopping was a fun way to spend time with friends/family, versus 44% of adult shoppers at large.
• Ecommerce provides a welcome distraction for Generation Z, with 62% of them agreeing that online shopping is a great way to stop getting bored, compared with 53% of older shoppers. Indeed, 70% of Generation Z shoppers agree that they “often browse online with no intention of buying (versus 63% of older shoppers).
• Just over one in four Generation Z consumers (28%) say that they spend lots of time on YouTube getting ideas and recommendations, compared to 13% of older shoppers. They are also twice as likely as other shoppers to cite product displays as important when shopping instore, and 49% agree that they use the displays instore/online to give them ideas (versus 41% of the broader shopping population).
• They also use their smartphones in-store more often, with 53% agreeing that this way they can get better information to help them decide what to buy when instore, compared to 38% of older shoppers.
• Generation Z consumers love a bargain: 48% agree that they tended to buy the cheapest they could so that they could buy more things they really like. 62% are also tempted to buy if an item is on promotion versus 55% of older shoppers.
• Generation Z are also the first truly digital generation, having grown up with the Internet and the World Wide Web. Almost all of them (97%) have either a laptop or a PC, 96% have a smartphone and 63% have a tablet.
• The biggest problem for retailers is that Generation Z are Generation Returner – they have no problem buying more items than they want, and returning what they don’t want. In fact, 28% of Generation Z agree that they buy lots of things online knowing they’re going to send most back, compared with 10% of older shoppers.
• They are more impulsive and more willing to take risks with an order than older shoppers; 44% of Generation Z say that they often buy things on the internet that they hadn’t planned to purchase, versus 32% of older shoppers.
• Speedy delivery is more important to Generation Z than to older shoppers, with one in five putting same day/next day delivery in their top three most important factors for shopping online, compared with one in ten older shoppers.

Social Media plays a huge role for Generation Z, and they are more likely than older shoppers to be connecting beyond their social groups of family and friends or even like-minded groups, to retailers or brands. Specifically:

• 79% of Generation Z use Facebook vs 66% of older shoppers; 24% regularly use it to contact retailers or brands.
• 50% of Generation Z use Instagram vs 17% of older shoppers; 41% regularly use it to contact retailers or brands.
• 49% of Generation Z use YouTube vs 27% of older shoppers; 32% regularly use it to contact retailers or brands.
• 41% of Generation Z use Twitter vs 26% of older shoppers; 48% regularly use it to contact retailers or brands.

Pinnington observes: “We’re all aware that Generation Z are easily bored and have a very short attention span, but on the flipside, they have great confidence and a terrific support system provided by social media which helps them to manage risk when they’re choosing what to do and what to buy. Plus they’re aware that retailers are interested in them and that they’re worth getting to know – this is in stark contrast to how many older shoppers feel.”

She concludes: “Generation Z know that they’re being courted, so it stands to reason that they expect to be impressed before they part with their cash. This apparent self-assurance is important because it will set a high bar against which retailers and brands will be judged moving forwards. Each touchpoint with these shoppers needs to be a positive experience and reflective of the brands’ tone of voice and values whilst remembering that this is a generation that enjoys shopping, so retailers will need to deliver to that brief and make it fun both instore and online.”

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Cheil Worldwide is consolidating its entire global retail resource under a single banner, Cheil Retail.

The new unit will be led by Simon Hathaway as the Global Chief Retail Officer. Hathaway, who joined Cheil in 2012, will head a team of 1,500 people across 52 offices in 43 markets.

Cheil Retail will work across both traditional retail and ecommerce, offering omni-channel solutions for clients.

The move recognises the importance that clients place on retail and their desire to work with specialists. Cheil Retail’s offering will include digital solutions, retail operations, data and analytics, store design and build, shopper-marketing and brand activation.

Cheil Retail’s launch aims to build on Cheil’s strong reputation in the sector, through work including the famous virtual store in a Seoul subway for Tesco Homeplus, mobile innovation with South Korea’s biggest retailer Emart, and the worldwide roll out of Samsung’s presence in retail.

Cheil leadership will work closely with Cheil Retail; the new specialism will also be partnering with the network’s other affiliate brands including The Barbarian Group, iris Worldwide and Cheil PengTai.

Daiki Lim, the Cheil Worldwide CEO & President, says: “Cheil Worldwide was born of the Eastern tech revolution and today we are a dynamic collaboration of specialisms, purpose-built for change. Retail is an industry that is experiencing huge change and clients are demanding specialist agencies. We’ve built an enviable global capability and our work in stores and ecommerce speaks for itself. The time is right to launch Cheil Retail as part of the ‘Network built for Now’”.

Simon Hathaway adds: “Today people expect retail to be everywhere – instant and personal – and we have brought together the skills, experience and creativity to deliver against the huge opportunities and challenges that brings for retailers and brands. I am looking forward to partnering with retailers and brands who are turning away from legacy networks and demanding specialists that can deliver solutions for the fast changing world of shopping.”

The Cheil Global Network unites specialisms in brand communications, retail, innovation, social and design and includes Cheil, The Barbarian Group, BMB, Bravo Asia, iris, McKinney, and One Agency.

Clients include Samsung, Absolut, Adidas, Etihad, GE, Google, Hyundai, Lego, Microsoft, Mini, Nestle and Shell.

Cheil is a subsidiary of the Samsung Group.

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In the US, Levi Strauss & Co. has linked with Goodwill to help shoppers give unwanted clothing and footwear to the charity and also raise funds.

The clothing giant has put a special shipping label on its US ecommerce sites for its Levi’s and Dockers brands which consumers can download for free. They can then fill boxes – such as the ones they get when they order goods from Levi’s and Dockers – with old clothes and shoes they want to donate to charity, stick the labels on and put them in the post. They will be sent to the local Goodwill depot.

Levi’s is also donating $5 for every box shipped using one of the labels, up to a maximum of $50,000.  On Giving Tuesday (December 1st, 2015), Levi’s will double its contribution to $10 for every free shipping label used, in support of the Global Day of Giving.

Marc Rosen, head of global ecommerce at Levi Strauss & Co, says: “Our partnership with Goodwill gives consumers a chance to reuse the boxes they receive from us, fill them with clothing they no longer need and support the important work of Goodwill in the process — it’s a win for online shoppers, the community and the planet.”

Levi Strauss & Co has a long track record of supporting charitable initiatives and has been a partner of Goodwill for many years.

Jim Gibbons, president and CEO of Goodwill Industries International, observes: “Donating allows Goodwill to fulfill its mission of supporting local communities by creating jobs and providing services to help people build their careers, while keeping textiles and other goods out of landfills.”

Goodwill alone diverted more than three billion pounds in weight of donated goods from landfills last year.

The Levi’s activity is supported by a service called Give Back Box, which allows consumers to reuse shipping boxes and even old cardboard to donate unwanted clothing and other items to charity. The idea is to make it easier for consumers to give things they no longer need to charity, saving them the hassle of having to go to a charity shop or collection point.

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