StORES Magazine - August 2007 - (Page 28)

RETAIL PEOPLE Cultivating Loyalty Former ad exec now helps brands define themselves Doug McIntyre Founder, Cult Marketing Isn’t it just a fact that customers mature and move on to more age-appropriate concepts or “trade up” to the next quality and price level? D oug McIntyre left a conventional ad agency in 2004 because he recognized that the world that he had worked in for 17 years had changed. The “mass” in mass media isn’t what it once was: media fragmentation and saturation, DVRs, consumer-generated marketing and general consumer skepticism have taken the wind out of its sails. media to launch this business? I think that’s true in some cases, like clothing, but I would argue that a Starbucks, Harley Davidson, Apple, CocaCola — I don’t know that people transition out of those brands. BlackBerry has people pretty locked in. They might trade up to the new technology, but they might stay within the BlackBerry brand. From your perspective, what retailers or brands are doing a good job using traditional media? Most brands are migrating their budgets away from traditional solutions and concentrating on the total experience — product design and innovation, customer intimacy and non-traditional communication vehicles — to deliver brand strategy to their target customers. Cult Marketing is on the leading edge of that movement. It helps retailers like Bath & Body Works, Nokia and Tween Brands make their most loyal customers even more loyal by developing holistic solutions that help companies create fanatical (cult) customers. You’ve called yourself a recovering “ad guy.” Did you use any traditional Funny story. At the end of 2004, we did a four-part mailer to announce the business. The first one said, “Cult,” and we sent it to 150 CEOs. That was it — nothing on it about where it came from. The next one said, “Don’t be afraid”; the third one was, “Don’t resist” and fourth one was “cultmarketing.com” and had a packet of grape Kool-Aid in it. We had calls from the FBI. We had the bomb squad in New York City deployed to test the Kool-Aid. We ended up having good conversations with about 25 of the companies because of it. What role does the store environment play in your approach to helping retailers realize more sales? The brand, particularly in retail, is actually delivered at the store level. Now there are things outside of the store level — the Internet, TV, there’s word of mouth and so on and so forth — but the delivery of the brand that you can control is at the store level. Some of the things we look at are music, scent, associate behaviors, policies — like return policies — and what’s going on in terms of merchandising. We help people operationalize the brand. What does that mean? One of the things I liked about MiniCooper when they first came out was their attitude. They said they wanted to look at what every other car manufacturer was doing, and then do something different. If you look at their early campaign, they did no TV. They did some print ads, but the ads were very different with multiple pages and pull outs and all kinds of games that drove you to their website to find the answers. When you buy the car, they give you a CD case of signs that you can hold up. They say, “Smile, it’s Friday” or “Let’s Motor.” It was little things like this that reinforced the brand. I think Abercrombie & Fitch does a phenomenal job on virtually every level of understanding who their core customer is. At their corporate headquarters, the same music playing in the stores is playing there; there are picnic benches instead of desks. It’s very much a manifestation of the attitude of the Abercrombie & Fitch stores. They want to live that brand at every touch-point. What do you do to relax or recharge your creative side? It deals with the personality of the brand. The first thing you have to do is communicate the brand clearly to the associates, because if they don’t know what the brand is, they can’t act in accordance with the brand. 28 STORES / AUGUST 2007 One of the things I’ve learned about creativity is that it can’t be forced. One of my favorite quotes attributed to Einstein is, “Creativity is the art of hiding your sources.” Structure kind of goes against creativity. StORES — Janet Groeber WWW.STORES.ORG http://cultmarketing.com http://WWW.STORES.ORG

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of StORES Magazine - August 2007

Contents Executive Editor's Page President's Page Upfront NRF News Retail People Concept2Watch Supermarkets Cover Story Online Marketing In-Store Marketing RFID Data Management Payment Systems Software Loss Prevention E-Commerce Risk Management Communications Loyalty Marketing Human Resources Mobile Commerce Loeb Retail Letter Arts Update Point of View Advertising Index Retail Industry Calendar

StORES Magazine - August 2007

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.