Tesco joins retail stampede to social media in bid to create brand chatter

Evidence that shoppers engaged via social media spend more is forcing retailers to radically change the way they communicate



 

 

It’s a chilly morning at St Pancras station in London and Linda Barker, former queen of home refurbishment on TV show Changing Rooms, is fashioning a camp Christmas table decoration from baubles and fake candy canes.
The cameras are rolling today, too, but this time they are streaming live to the Tesco website and Barker’s viewers are able to quiz her directly via the supermarket’s Facebook and Twitter feeds.
Commuters at the station may seem bemused, but the event marks the supermarket’s effort to join time the retail stampede towards social media, which this Christmas is seen for the first time as key to capturing mainstream shoppers’ attention. Nearly every TV ad has a Twitter hashtag attached.
Whether it is Marks & Spencer trying to inspire small good deeds through Twitter with its “follow the fairies” campaign or discount grocer Lidl using customer tweets as the basis of its advertising campaign, retailers are trying to get involved in the internet’s playgrounds.
Evidence that shoppers engaged via social media spend more and people are increasingly influenced by advice and recommendations from peers on sites such as Facebook and Twitter is forcing retailers to radically change the way they communicate.
In the first half of this year UK spending on social media advertising rose by 73% to £396m, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB). But it is not only about advertising. Social media promotion is all about getting shoppers involved in sharing information, pictures or video clips with their contacts, acting as advocates for the brand, whether through public social media such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, or through private channels including messaging apps such as Whats App – or even the relatively old-fashioned emails and forums.
Handbag maker Mulberry has credited its tongue-in-cheek YouTube clip, in which a grandmother outguns a family’s Christmas present offerings of a unicorn and a waving puppy by deploying one of the brand’s bags, for helping it revive sales after a difficult year. The clip helped lift visits to Mulberry’s website by 30%, according to chairman Godfrey Davis. “We thought we could have a bit of fun and we seem to have hit on demand,” he said.
Social media is playing a role in all sectors of the market. For the second year in a row Sainsbury’s caused a stir online with a highly emotional seasonal ad, this year based on the first world war trenches. It barely mentions the brand but has prompted heated debate across Twitter and mainstream media helping it notch up more than 13.6m views on Youtube, more than 10 times the number achieved by its ad last year. The controversy over the use of the war has brought it much closer in terms of clicks to the master of Christmas ads, John Lewis, whose penguin love story this year has so far attracted more than 18m views on Youtube.
A spokesperson for Sainsbury’s said: “Social media is now a well established channel for relationship building and a person that has had a positive experience with your brand on social media will be more likely not only to shop with you but also defend your brand’s reputation to their friends.”
Raising interest increasingly means creating interesting content, often quite different to that shown on mainstream media. Waitrose has Heston Blumenthal making prawn cocktail on its internet TV channel devoted to cookery programmes and has used a variety of social media to get shoppers involved, singing on its Christmas advert or sharing pictures of biscuits they have made for family and friends.
Waitrose’s “Bake it Forward” campaign is one of the first to try to adapt an engagement concept common to young women who use Asos’s and Primark’s Fashion Finder and Primania sites – which encourage shoppers to post pictures of themselves wearing their latest purchases and feed them into editorial content on the latest trends.
The Waitrose campaign has generated more than 65,000 photo or video “engagements”.
“We will see more and more of this kind of thing,” said Waitrose’s marketing director, Rupert Thomas. “We don’t control this space. We are helping to inspire customers and ultimately helping them provide their own content and inspire each other.
“Increasingly published content is passed around and we think that’s a very important part of the mix. Using traditional forms of media is not enough any more.”
Waitrose has seen its number of fans and followers rise 31% on Facebook and 36% on Twitter since last year, when social engagement doubled over Christmas.
Generating social chatter is not always as spontaneous as it might seem. M&S’s social agency, Unity, hired “stooges” around the country to film an array of events it had set up – including a “sighting” of fairies over a bridge in Newcastle and unexpected snow falling outside a school in Cornwall – and then alert local media. “It was a PR campaign without speaking to journalists,” says Nik Govier of Unity. She says campaigns which involve social media are increasingly being demanded by clients. “People want big brand ideas. Month by month clients are appreciating the need for linking everything together across every channel.”
Refrences:
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/dec/04/tesco-retail-stampede-social-media-create-brand-chatter