Karen Millen’s top marketer on how brand insight is driving commercial strategy
In retail, more often than not, commercial goals dictate marketing strategy. But, Karen Millen’s newly formed all-female leadership team is taking a different approach by letting the brand team influence everything, from product to the in-store experience.
Karen Millen's overhaul begins to bear fruit
The shake-up was sparked with the hiring of Beth Butterwick as the fashion brand’s CEO and Emily Tate as chief financial officer, as well as the promotion of Charlotte Ellis from head of digital to customer director, last year.
At the time of their arrival, the business was suffering as operating losses crept up to £10.5m, profits dropped 8% and sales tumbled by 10% globally (covering the period for the year ending February 2016.)
“The brand really took the opportunity [with the new management] to step back and look at what the customer really wanted and what we done that’s different to the rest of the high street,” Ellis recently told The Drum.
But before starting on what would turn out to be a massive piece customer research, Karen Millen overhauled its internal structure to ensure that whatever the customer was saying, it was capable of listening to and acting on. Marketing, digital, PR and CRM – all previously siloed – now sit together under the direction of Ellis
“We are the voice of the customer in the business. And we’re also the voice of the brand for the customer; so rather than working in traditional silos, which a lot of retailers still struggle with (particularly when you’ve been going for 35 years like Karen Millen has) we’re now incredibly agile and progressive in our mindset," she said.
"The business strategy is now being driven by the brand strategy having listened to our target audience.”
Ellis said the research undertook highlighted there are two types of customers it now needs to target. Women who “emotionally” invest in a Karen Millen piece; it’s something they wear to a job interview, a wedding, graduation. And women who wear Karen Millen day-in-day-out, who take comfort in knowing that they don’t have to “worry” about a fashionable outfit.
Trying to engage with both has led it to throw out the traditional ‘beginning of season’ above-the-line campaign that most high-end fashion brands adhere to and instead adopt a year-round, content-led strategy.
“We’ve started to layer content into big moments in season that resonate with the brand beyond product. We’re seeing that across the fashion space, but I think at the premium market it’s not being adopted so we wanted to be ahead of the game. We’ve also increased paid marketing but we’ve focused on paid media on social media channels – namely Facebook and Instagram – as well as programmatic and retargetting,” said Ellis.
“We took the drastic decision to cut print advertising but we wanted to build a relationship, create content, work with our partners across digital platforms as opposed to just being an ad in a magazine.”
Its most recent campaign, Women Who Can, is an example of this strategy in action. It’s a new six month activation – although it will be extended, Ellis said – that aims to “equip women with the tools, knowledge and support to achieve their goals” and has seen the retailer partner with career development club Step Up (which is run by women for other women).
Editorial content, social activations and in-store events will explore themes associated with female empowerment with involvement from numerous women from the worlds of business, sport and campaigning, such as wealth manager and tech entrepreneur, Gemma Godfrew.
Moving forward, it plans to put more spend behind influencer marketing through Ellis is looking to avoid the “volume and churn” approach of affiliate and instead invest budgets with a small number of “authentic” influencers on certain projects.
For example, the ‘White Shirt Project’ at the beginning of the year resulted in “great engagement” but, more importantly, the products featured sold-out, something the brand wasn’t seeing a year previously.
While it will be another few months until its full-year results are revealed, Ellis said “green roots are showing” as the brand recalibrates.
“Taking that leap as a brand when you’ve been doing one thing for so long and deciding it’s not the right way moving forward and make that change has been fantastic. We’ve seen social and database growth and direct digital sales have really benefitted. It’s still relatively focused on the UK but we are seeing success globally [across 60 international stores].”