Customers aren't for Christmas: a whitepaper from Cherry London

© Copyright Cherry London 2013

CUSTOMERS AREN’T JUST FOR CHRISTMAS; HOW BRAND PARTNERSHIPS CAN MAKE ALL THE

DIFFERENCE

© Copyright Cherry London 2013 | November 2013 2

OVERVIEW

Executive Summary 3

INSIGHTS

The survey and its results 4

How can Brand Partnerships make a difference 5

Insight 1: Create a meaningful truth; O2 Priority; Topshop and Google+ 7

Insight 2: Tell a story; John Lewis; Gillette and Movember 8

Insight 3: The big idea; Western Union; Coke 9

Insight 4: Right place right time: O2 Priority; Malibu 10

SUMMARY Brand Partnerships as complement and catalysts 11

CUSTOMERS AREN’T JUST FOR CHRISTMAS; HOW BRAND PARTNERSHIPS CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE

© Copyright Cherry London 2013 3


Executive summary

This Christmas, brands will spend millions trying to entice customers to action –

to choose their particular product or service over another, to get their message

across, to get their Facebook post liked and shared...

Each will be trying to carve a unique space in people’s hearts “guaranteeing”

their share of the Christmas buzz and spend. This year it has started earlier than

ever – the blockbuster ads have been out for what feels like weeks, the mince

pies are on the shelves and your Christmas ‘essentials’ could be found as early as

August on some retailers’ shelves.

But just how important is marketing activity in getting customers to act? Is it

even worth it or are people’s minds already made up? What can brands do to

really connect? Does investment in a long term loyalty programme help?

And how can Brand Partnerships be used to help cut through in this increasingly

over-whelming cluttered world?

Charlie Hills Strategy director, Cherry London



We started off by asking 1,000 people what they think will influence their Christmas

shopping. The good news for all of those with ‘Marketing’ in our job description is that

two thirds of customers said that we do have influence on what they buy at

Christmas. Thank goodness… deep sigh of relief…

However, it isn’t all good news. It turns out that the millions we spend, the thousands of

man hours we invest, the gallons of coffee we consume isn’t quite as effective as we think.

Of those surveyed, only 15% said it was ‘very likely’ that marketing activity would

influence their Christmas shopping – just under half the amount of people that said we

have no impact whatsoever – and exactly the same amount of people said they weren’t

influenced by marketing activity, but by recommendations from someone they

know. We just have to hope that this trusted advisor IS impacted by our activities.

We also learned some things that shocked us to our core – did you know that as people’s

income increases the influence of marketing activity on their Christmas shopping

decreases? 45% of those earning over £40k said marketing activity had no effect. Did you

know that as people get older the same thing happens?

The survey



So how can marketers cut through?

We thought that having a long-term loyalty programme fuelled by Brand Partnerships

would help with cutting through at Christmas. It turns out that only half our survey

agreed. That’s pretty good, but it’s not good enough for us. 49% of people told us that

demonstrating you care about and understand them influences them. 47% of them told

us that rewarding them for their custom had an impact. 36% of people said regular

contact through-out the year makes a difference. So, we know that a good loyalty pro-

gramme rooted in insight is important to people, but what else do brands need to do to

really connect to their customers?

We have conducted a number of explorations to see how we can make a difference –

we have live case studies from the work we do with our clients including O2, Aviva,

Malibu and Western Union and we have looked outside our sphere to see how other

brands are doing it (such as the great partnership between TopShop and Google+ for

London Fashion Week, or the Movember and Gillette partnership). We haven’t just

looked at Christmas either, we’ve looked at the whole calendar year and the whole cus-

tomer lifecycle to draw our conclusions. So what did we learn?

1,000 UK adults surveyed online, Cherry London, Nov 1st 2013

49% want us to show we care

47% say rewards influ-ence their decisions

Our survey said... How likely is it that your Christmas Shopping this year will be influenced by a

brand’s marketing activity?

Very likely 15%

No influence whatsoever 35%

What factors will make you more likely to buy from a brand this Christmas?

The brand demonstrates it cares about and understands them 49%

The brand rewards them for their custom 47%

The brand has regular contact through-out the year 36%


We learned that in today’s marketplace, marketing activity fuelled by Brand

Partnerships is ideally set up to make the difference. Customers want

big ideas and they want them now.

By working together brands can create big stories, big ideas and big executions that

inspire and motivate customers to action. They can also deliver them in meaningful ways,

just where, how and when their customers want them. Then they can harness their com-

plementary strengths to create things that will inspire customers, things they could never

achieve on their own. Like the O2 Priority and Caffe Nero partnership – O2 can offer all

its customers a free coffee on a cold rainy morning, and Caffe Nero can get people who

were walking past to come in the door.

We found 4 key things that Brand Partnerships can add to a marketing strategy to help

brands cut through.


A hot coffee on a cold day



Meaningful truth Help a brand to really and credibly own a meaningful human truth. Most brands today understand that

emotion is a powerful driver of loyalty and a very important driver in the purchase decision. Most are try-

ing to find a relevant, powerful and meaningful human truth, and own it. This is where Brand Partnerships

comes into its own. A powerful truth is often complex to own as a single brand and we have all seen a lot

of force fitting. However, when complementary brands work together they can credibly own a truth – they

can leverage their complementary strengths to own the right passion, the right moment and the right

space. Find complementary brands that can help you own an important human truth and work with them

to demonstrate your ownership through action.

O2 Priority was founded on the simple insight that customers want to feel important; we all want to be a

‘priority’. O2 Priority works with its partner brands to give its customers unique access and rewards linked

to the things they love, things it couldn’t offer them on its own. It understands its

customers’ passions (music, sport, fashion, film, eating

out, shopping) and then works with partner brands to give

customers amazing moments and rewards against those pas-

sions, harnessing the power of O2 technology to deliver them in

just the right way. O2 have stuck to this powerful truth - con-

sistently innovating to make their customers feel more of a pri-

ority. And it works. O2’s churn rate is less than half that of its

competitors, meaning millions more customers stay with O2 than

they do with its rivals. That benefit is worth millions of pounds to the

business.

Another great partnership, the TopShop and Google+ London Fashion Week collaboration, leveraged a

softer human truth – inclusion. They worked to bring the catwalk into customers’ lives, enabling custom-

ers to take part and to translate the excitement and aspiration of the catwalk into their everyday. From

the ‘Be the buyer app’ to the instore ‘Be the model’ photobooth, the entire partnership worked to bring

Topshop’s fashion credentials together with Google+’s technological and social expertise to create a cam-

paign that really worked. Over 200 million people saw content from the show in the first three hours, and

Topshop was the most talked about brand during London Fashion Week.

As O2’s CEO Ronan Dunn said, Priority

was about changing things – to create

a loyalty programme so compelling

that 99% of O2 customers didn’t want

to go anywhere else.


Tell a story Telling a compelling story in an engaging way is the

next piece of the puzzle. M&S’s Christmas ad has

literally taken the world’s most famous fairytale

stories and turned them into a product

advertisement, and in the most hotly anticipated

Christmas ad of the season, John Lewis have gone

step further – just telling an enchanting story

about the Bear and the Hare, foregoing any

product advertising at all. And the results speak

for themselves - John Lewis has reported £101m

record takings thanks to the Christmas ad and

their new loyalty programme - 10.7% up on last

year’s figures; the story and the emotion have

been given licence to be more powerful than the

product.

When brands work together they can harness

their assets to create a powerful story, but

critically tell it in a more interesting way than they

could on their own. We’ve already looked at how

TopShop and Google+ created a compelling story

around London Fashion Week – with Topshop

providing the content of the story and Google+

facilitating the story-telling. Gillette and

Movember play similar roles – they worked

together to create a powerful “story experience”.

At its centre was a themed vintage barbershop

and Gentleman’s clubhouse just off Carnaby

Street in London that transported customers into

a ‘place that time forgot’. Movember brought the

purpose, content and the moral to the story,

Gillette facilitated it and told the story through an

interactive experience, yielding the important

benefits of cut through and of course, reach. On

their own, neither brand could have achieved

something so powerful.


Topshop and Google +: ‘Be the model’

Topshop and Google+: Cara Delevinge

Gillette and Movember


The big idea

Create a big simple idea that is new and unique. As marketers we are all guilty of getting

bored of our own stuff before our customers do, or working by committee to evolve

and iterate campaigns, increasing complexity by channel and through-out the

marketing calendar. We are also guilty of erring towards the things that are tried, tested

and safe, rather than those things which are new and risky. But the best don’t do this,

when brands work together they can be braver.

With Western Union we have a big new idea – the idea to celebrate Dual Belonging:

“When your heart belongs in more than one place, when you’re as proud of your

heritage as you are of your future, when you impact societies, cultures and economies

as much as they impact you, when you make a difference in multiple places at once. Be

proud of your dual belonging. We are.” We work with Western Union and multiple

global brand partners to bring this big idea to life through a central loyalty programme

called “My WU”. It connects their 200 million customers to their homeland and the

people they love through products, services, experiences and rewards that matter. On

its own Western Union could only deliver one part of this big idea, but by working with

multiple brand partners from across the globe, they can deliver on this big promise;

they can be more than a money transfer service.

Coke’s share a coke campaign was another great example of a big simple unique idea.

Coke took the idea of “I am unique” and sharing happiness and created a campaign that

will go down in history. Named bottles, user generated content, #shareacoke, an online

partnership with Ocado to enable customers to order bottles with their name on it

direct from their website, and an offline partnership with Tesco dispensing limited

edition Share a Coke bottles printed with any given name on, all contributed to

delivering this big idea. In this campaign, the partners have enhanced the delivery of

the big idea, made it a richer customer experience. In Australia, which was the first

market to run the campaign, they saw young adult consumption increase by 7% and an

870% increase in their Facebook traffic. They have achieved significant cut through in a

cluttered market and we all expect this campaign to run and run and for Brand

Partnerships to play an increased role over time.



Be in the right place, at the right time, in the right

way. This has never been more relevant. The expo-

nential growth in technology and the ever increas-

ing dependence on our smartphones means that

customers demand contact in the way that they

want it, when and how they want it. We are all

multi-screen multi-channel consumers – it’s not

even about getting the right message in the right

channel anymore, it’s about getting the right com-

bination of messages in the right combination of

channels and listening to and acting on the mes-

sages you get back from your audience. No one

brand can do it all – when brands work together

they can use their entire toolkits for mutual bene-

fit.

With O2 we have used the power of the mobile

phone to always be in the right time in the right

place. The location based loyalty programme

offers customers relevant rewards from brand

partners in just the right moment: the Halfords de-

ice your car reward on the first day of the Big

Freeze, the Walls Ice-Cream on the hottest day of

the summer. The TopShop and Google+ Fashion

Week partnership also harnessed the power of

Google technology to be timely and bring the fair-

ytale excitement of the catwalk into their custom-

ers’ everyday – the fashion show was streamed

direct via Topshop’s website, Google+ and Twitter

and HD microcameras were even fitted to the

model’s outfits and accessories to give the model’s

eye view. Then Topshop used its amazing retail

footprint to bring the campaign to life in the real

world as well, not to mention its own powerful dig-

ital arsenal.

It doesn’t all have to be about technology though,

Right place, right time


.with Malibu we created a multi-media

‘Malibutique’ experience for customers. We

worked with brand partners GHD, Toni&Guy, ASOS

and Nails inc to create the ultimate ‘getting ready

for the big night out experience’. We hosted a

roadshow in shopping centres in London, Man-

chester, Birmingham and Leeds. Nearly 20,000

people visit the pop-up Malibutique events each

year and we’ve quadrupled the Facebook fan base

year on year. By carefully selecting the right brand

partners and leveraging their multiple strengths,

we created a campaign that shifted brand percep-

tion amongst a demanding female customer base

– to do the same through traditional advertising

would have cost over £4m.

Malibutique pop-up dressing room


CUSTOMERS AREN’T JUST FOR CHRISTMAS; HOW BRAND PARTNERSHIPS CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE So what?

If we apply all those 4 learnings can we really cut through and connect with the increasingly savvy custom-

er at Christmas?

Half of our survey told us that good long term loyalty programmes based on insight do make a difference.

That isn’t enough. That’s the starting point.

At Cherry London we believe brands need to be brave and bold. Brand Partnerships can help brands to iden-

tify and own meaningful human insights that matter, tell compelling stories, create big new ideas and be in

the right place at the right time, in the right way. Brand Partnerships is all about brands acting as comple-

ments and catalysts for each other – harnessing and leveraging their mutually beneficial strengths and en-

abling each other to think and be bigger.

It’s like mince pies and brandy butter – on their own they are great, but together they are extraordinary.

© Copyright Cherry London 2013

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