Innovating In Times Of Uncertainty

So as we head in the current climate, businesses are being challenged to cut costs while finding creative new ways to attract and retain customers. So in this next session, we're going to look at how retailers are dealing with shrinking resources and innovating in times of uncertainty. For this next session, please welcome up Shira Feuer of Trinny London, Trevor Hardy of Orlebar Brown and Simon Gresham Jones of Mulberry. Welcome, thank you so much for joining us today. Just to kick off, it'd be great if you can just say a few words about your backgrounds and your current role. Starting with you, Simon. Hi, so yes, my whole background has been in luxury, lifestyle, and entertainment. So back in the old days, movies, video games, and music. Then I moved on to Burberry, where I made my move into fashion. So I spent seven years there working with Shira as well for part of it and then after that, to Condé Nast, where I was chief digital officer for four years, and now I'm at Mulberry. And in between that, I've spent some time consulting for luxury and fashion brands. Hello, I'm Shira. I actually started my career as a banker. It was horrendous, I don't recommend it. And then I moved over, started in agencies, then went over to Burberry, then Disney, and then a bunch of start-ups, a bit of consulting, and now Trinny London for the last four and a half years. Like Shira, I'm a fine Canadian, so we have that in common and I started in boring management consulting as well. Sorry, I'm Trevor Hardy, but then spent most of my career in advertising agencies on the planning and strategy side, got therapy for all of those years, and then worked at a company called the Future Laboratory for a while before joining OB and spent most of my career in fashion luxury lifestyle brands. And Trevor, so just sticking with you. I know you joined Orlebar Brown back in 2019, so before the pandemic hit, I'd love just to know how your role as CMO has changed over these past few years and really where your priorities are at the moment and some of these changes you've seen in consumer behavior? It's funny because I was thinking about this last week because I think about a third of our office was down with COVID, or was down with COVID, so I was thinking about what we may have learned during that period. It was devastating for some of us and some lucky people, there was lessons to be learned and good things that came out of it. I was trying last week to remember all those good things, new habits that we might have learned that we have retained, or could retain. And one of them was, I've always been a student of marketing, like loving the process and strategy and thinking and models, and most of that served me well. I always tried to think my way through through problems, but COVID really messed that up because there was no rulebook. There was nothing that could prepare us for what happened. And it made me, in some ways think that we have to do things by gut, some things by feel, rather than by thinking through things so I suppose what's really changed for me is that I've become less of a thinking marketer and more of a feeling marketer. The things that you're driven by gut in many ways our customers and consumers are driven by gut and more of our decisions have to be potentially less thoughtful, less considered, less involved, and just more, more feeling driven. And Shira, 2019 was also the year that you joined Trinny London. I think the brand was about a year and a half old when you joined. What is it that attracted you to Trinny London? I mean, full disclosure, I originally said "no" several times because I thought it was a famous person slapping her name on a brand and I wasn't interested. So eventually they convinced me to try the products and I actually liked them so much that I bought them because I tried them in Finneck, and I still didn't think I was going to do it, but I thought it would be a funny story to tell my English friends who knew who this woman was if I went and met her. So went and had a meeting and discovered that all the pieces were there, and they just weren't being put together quite yet, and that there was really a massive opportunity. So it was really exciting, and so I joined. Simon, Mulberry was founded back in 1971, the largest manufacturer of luxury goods in the UK. So I'd love to know how you combine tradition and innovation in your marketing strategies. Sure. So I think as a marketing function, we're quite lucky that the traditional part of the brand, which I'll touch upon in a minute, rather informs the innovation part. So from the very beginning, the brand's been about a made-to-last philosophy, and that's about products that genuinely have longevity built into them that we're proud to give life after life for resale platforms, for The Mulberry Exchange. So there's real substance to all of that stuff that talks about the longevity of the product, the celebration of craft, beauty in the products. In fact, that's what's increasingly informing what we're doing that we think is the more innovative end of what we're trying to do. So if innovation is about doing things differently or things that perhaps we see other brands doing less, we're really leaning into the pre-loved area of our products because one, as was being said earlier, there's huge interest in that area, genuinely has passion for discovering, reinvigorating, customizing, styling differently with pre-loved products. And that's something that our products, our brand plays into. So naturally and it's part of what we're doing with our manifesto around making 'Made To Last' as part of our sustainability and regenerative efforts. So a lot of what we're doing is in that space, we've just launched a traveling pop-ups in four major cities in China, all about pre-loved, but also bespoke bags. But mixed in with that is digital ID. So rolling out the ability to use digital technology to recognize the provenance of individual products, which again helps counterfeiting and again perpetuates this economy of buying pre-loved products and giving it a whole new lease of life. So we're doing a lot of stuff that feels new, and I think it's quite unusual in some of those markets in China, for example, to be talking so much about pre-loved alongside our new product and being very proud about that, working with the famous talents and our campaigns in China, which I think is very rare to have a famous model or actress in China, or in the West, for that matter, holding a pre-loved bag, proudly, and creating a whole narrative around that with the big traveling pop-up, etc. So that's an example of, I hope, tradition and celebrating the longevity of our products and forming some new ways of doing things. And can you just tell us a little bit more about that 'Made To Last' manifesto? What are some of the initiatives and sort of pledges you have in place? Yeah, sure. So as I was just saying, made-to-last has been part of the philosophy of the brand from the beginning, in Somerset around a kitchen table. I wasn't there, but now in 2021 we codified that into the 'Made To Last' manifesto, which like many brands, is trying to set down meaningfully what that means, what our commitment to that is. So that is a commitment to being throughout our supply chain, fully regenerative and circular by 2030. And that's a real re-organization, the entire business around those goals. So again, as a marketer, I feel quite lucky. I think we all have met some brands, I'm sure not in this room use marketing as a sort of smokescreen for a lack of effort in that area. I'm lucky and my team are lucky. There's real substance there and our job is just to make sure we're reflecting it accurately and in ways that excite people and get them interested. So the substance stuff, that is The Mulberry Exchange. We have a very developed program for the lifecycle, the ongoing love and care of our product. So we we've received tens of thousands of bags which we rejuvenate and then return to the owner or we'll offer to buy them back off you for credits for which you can buy a beautiful new Mulberry bag. So really building all these programs out there are very, quite ambitious, broad platforms for driving that kind of circular economy. Great, thank you. Trevor, can you tell us a little bit more about how you use storytelling to really create a deeper emotional connection with your customers? I don't want to interpret that you're a marketing cynic like I am, but I have a love-hate relationship with the word storytelling just because I think I used to use it in agency land to wrap up ideas into something better because it was a story. But, marketing things generally are there to help people stop scrolling or stop walking by in a window or in a magazine stop you flipping. So for us, it's just trying to create something that has some stopping power, some engaging power that's surprising or unexpected or lovable in some way. And Orlebar Brown's very first product was a pair of swim shorts that was created in the same manner that a tailored men's pair of trousers was created, so it made men look good and made them feel good. So we've created a platform, for lack of a better word, called 'OB Shorts' because we make shorts and it's rooted in short stories or short films. And so we create a long narrative which is born from a product, it's told through long copy, which is an unusual thing in fashion because there's never any copy in fashion marketing. But telling a longer story and then we work with a photographer, director, a great, great woman named Marie Schuller, who creates these film trailers, if you will, this format of telling really long stories in really short, compact ways and those unexpected, maybe rich production value films are, I think for our customers at least, are interesting ways to bring them into the brand and make them spend a little bit more time than they normally would. Yeah, and I think that's really brought to life in your recent campaign film 'Sunny's Quest for a Simple Life'. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and how it's performed? Well, we have a muse that all of our products are designed to, we call him 'Sunny' and there's a long, we've written a book on a guide to being 'Sunny' as well. So we've found a way to fall in love with who our prototypical customer is and in this case we had a summer campaign, we called it 'Flights of Fantasy.' We're rooted in travel and holidays and this was how can we create things that are taking people on a path less traveled, doing the unexpected, dancing new dances, eating new foods? And it was a creative campaign that tried to bring that ideal to life. Summer's our best time of the year, summer in every hemisphere, but it's performed very well for us. I think finding new ways to convey the craft and the care that goes into product through creativity and through production value and through the channels we use has done very well for us this year at least. Shira, I know you talk a lot about impactful entertainment. Can you tell us how you're using that to reach a wider audience and give us some examples? Sure so my view is that people don't like being sold to and the beauty of being in a startup is you don't always have lots of money. So you have to be creative in what you do and I acknowledge how lucky I am that I have somebody who comes from TV at my disposal to be in the content. But more than that, she's willing to do a lot of crazy things that we tell her to do. So, for example, I remember when I emailed her saying, "I want to recreate the dance scene from 'Love Actually' and I want you to be Hugh Grant and dance. Will you do it?" And like with no hesitation, she's like, "Yes, on it!" And we do stuff like that all the time. So we're very, very lucky that she does it. We just create content that we would want to watch and we would want to tell people about, and it needs to entertain us because if you're going after organic editorial reach, it's hard to get, so it has to actually be really good content. So yeah, we're very lucky we're able to do it, but it's a big focus. Just today we had a brainstorm around gifting and it was just making each other laugh with the ridiculous ideas. Trinny's in New York, she doesn't know about the ideas yet, but they'll be coming her way and you'll be seeing some some good stuff soon. And in terms of your audience, who is your core demographic and what are some of those channels that you're using to reach them? So for us, generally speaking, we target a 35+ year old woman. We have found that the beauty industry in general is quite ageist and there's a real opportunity to talk to an older woman who is ignored by the industry and overlooked and the opportunity is often overlooked. So we still talk to an ageless consumer in the sense of we have lots of younger customers too, but we really make a point of trying to talk to that older customer. So Instagram and Facebook actually are still our primary channels that we use. And it's great because if nobody else is using Facebook and we're the only ones, there is an audience to speak to, so those are the main channels. And Trevor, in a recent interview with Vogue Business, you said that the biggest area of investment for you is the physical stores and physical events. Is that not counterintuitive in this digital age? It might be, it might be. We joined the Chanel family three-ish years ago, and there's a handful of things that Chanel does extraordinarily well. One of them is they're massive believers in physical things. So we've made significant investment in new stores, in new cities, and resorts around the world. They are long, very long-horizon thinkers. For us, that means that we spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about our high-value customers, who they are, what they think about, and we create most experiences, whether it's advertising things, or marketing or events, or in-store experiences, geared towards those customers who we hope will be with us for the longer term, not just one-off purchasers. And I suppose the last thing is that focus on high-value. A lot of our activity, at least our physical activity, is geared towards those high-value customers and the digital activity we find is much better at bringing in occasional customers. So the predominant investment is towards those more physical things, those physical experiences which also allow customers to see and touch and feel a product. And it's not, it's not either/or, it's 'and' world that we live in, and we spend at least half, if not more, of our budget on digital objects, increasingly on more partnership work than than soulless advertising. Simon, I know that Mulberry closed its Bond Street store earlier this year, but has seen huge growth in markets like China and South Korea. So I'd love to know what you're doing to appeal to that sort of younger, more digitally-savvy audience. Yeah, sure. Bond Street, by the way, closed against the backdrop of the changing tourist tax free shopping situation, of course. We now invite our tourists into our Regent Street flagship, but thought that was the right thing to do with such a dramatic footfall in luxury tourist footfall in Bond Street. Talking about the balancing digital and physical, a lot of it is about that, and talking about, if the question's about Asia specifically, is that right? Yes. So I touched on, for example, the traveling pop-ups in China, but that is also very much about digital piece of activity as well, where, for example, we've done a big partnership with Little Red Book, which is the Chinese social media platform. A lot of this is about thinking differently and how we might punch above our weight in certain markets. And again, by leaning on some of that real opportunity around pre-loved digital ID, doing a limited edition piece around allowing people to create Bespoke Bayswater bags, and that affords a whole bigger opportunity with the Red platform, and they're excited themselves to get behind something that celebrated pre-loved product and that may be key to a much bigger creation of a destination within that social platform, which has now reached tens, in fact, I think scores of millions of Chinese consumers, so huge, and we couldn't have done that to that scale without the pre-loved element. In Korea, we've just had a big partnership with Frieze for Frieze Seoul, and that was again about creating a real physical moment for the brand, but also how we partner with Naver and Kakao on more innovative and unexpected digital experiences that wrap into that. So physical, digital, finding new stories to tell, but still anchored in some of the foundational elements of the brand. Shira, what are you doing at Trinny London to really build a loyal base of customers and turn shoppers into advocates and fans? So one of the things we do, we have something called the 'Trinny Tribe Community.' So the group's over 100,000 now, I think, of brand advocates. They live on Facebook groups, so again, we go to where they are. They are people who started by meeting in this digital community. It was really important through lockdown. But now we encourage as many events as we can handle in order for people to meet in real life. We have people who become friends in real life. And the point is that in these groups, it's not just about selling product. It's actually like-minded people who are coming together. But when they do recommend our products, people believe them because they know that they can trust these people because they will share things good and bad about our brand and about lots of other things. So that's been really, really powerful for us. They are the best brand advocates you could wish for, so it's just about helping to nurture that environment as much as we can. And they are always wearing sequins. They like sequins. I'd love to know from each of you where your biggest priority is at the moment as a CMO, starting with you, Simon. There's a lot, so I think trying to achieve balance in all that we do, I think we were talking about balance earlier, and that's balance across the team, all the things we have to focus on, across physical and digital. How we invest, how we protect the investment we need to make in a pressured economic environment, because I'm sure we'd all agree that for luxury brands and fashion lifestyle, brand is almost everything and we've got to keep building the brand. So a lot of it is about trying to get the right balance in everything we do. And as we evolve, making sure that we're doing things that are anchored in substance, not marketing for its own sake. I looked at you both in agreement there, not because I think you do marketing for its own sake and making sure that everything we're doing is anchored in some real truth about the brand, and that is reflective of the journey we are on towards 2030 and a regenerative circular business. So that's the ongoing balancing act, I would say. Shira? Well, we're a six-year-old brand, so for us, it's still very much about focusing on growth, how do we reach new people in new markets, and then how do we keep our existing customers happy? Because the ones who were there from the beginning are very passionate people and we don't want to make them feel abandoned as we grow and there's a lot more people coming into the business. So making sure that the products that we make are going to retain them because they're going to love it, that's a big part of it, but how do we make them still feel loved by the brand over time? For me, I think it would be creativity and consistency, maybe they're not natural bedfellows, but the I think there's always a war against creativity, and especially as we look to different channels, the increasingly small channels that we have to place ourselves in don't allow for as much creativity perhaps as bigger spaces or physical spaces do. But that war against mediocrity, I think, is continuously fought every single minute of the day. But then how do you restrain that so that we're not a different brand, giving a different experience, looking a different way depending on where we might appear, whether it's channels or country? So the tension between always trying to be very creative, but at the same time have some consistency. And in this current economic climate where we're seeing shrinking budgets and resources, what do you think are the essential tools that brand leaders and marketers need to invest in? Good people, I'd say, would be probably better talent, better data, better insight, and great intuition. Ambitious, ambitious, curious people. I mean, I was going to say the same. Making sure that the team is feeling motivated so they can be as productive as they can is, for us, the biggest focus. I really echo at the point about gut feel being so strong. Yes, data is critical. We talk about being data in forms, not data driven, and you've got to use it alongside your gut. Otherwise you can follow data to the wrong conclusion. So I think, again, that's about balance. And what can we expect next from Mulberry in terms of marketing? Well, we're continuing to build out some of the themes I've been talking about around pre-loved whilst also celebrating our new, we've got some new products coming that we're very excited about, finding new ways to bring those to the world. Some new partnerships which will be announcing soon. And I'm really trying to build out the digital presence and the physical presence globally in our key markets, but trying to stay true to the heart of the brand. Shira, so Trinny London, one of the fastest growing beauty brands in Europe at the moment. What's next for you? What are some of the big markets or categories you're looking at? So I need to think about what I'm allowed to say. But new products coming soon, focusing on different markets, including the US, more retail, so more physical space. We've grown vast majority DTC over the last few years, so we want to do more in physical spaces, but it's still just full steam ahead with everything, really. We took a new approach to collaborations in the last year or so, and so I'm excited about a couple. We're doing a collab with a women's wear brand that I can't name and a car brand that I can't name next year is going to be noisy and fun and unusual, so we're excited about that. And we're opening a lot of stores in California and Greece and Middle East and Asia as well. So stores and collabs. If you each had to share a tip with the brand leaders in the room on how to futureproof loyalty, what would it be? Give it to me in one sentence. Never forget who your customer really is. Understanding them, managing duality of new customers versus your existing customers and using your gut alongside your data. That's a very long sentence. Very eloquent. You basically stole what I was going to say, I was going to say know your audience. I'll do a David Bowie quote instead, "I don't know where I'll be next, but I promise it won't be boring". It's all about doing the unexpected, I think. Love it, thank you. Any questions from the audience? I just wanted to hear your thoughts around what the role of store and in-store experience will be in the future and how it fits with your multi-channel campaigns? Critically important in keeping with the theme of physical and digital, I've sort of been around the block of what that's meant over the years of trying to innovate in-store without it being gimmicky and find things that really create a warm, genuinely fun or engaging or surprising experience. So we do a lot of events in our stores, poetry nights, parties, music events, curated evenings, but also trying to find ways to empower our store associates to have more interesting encounters with our customers. So really important and lots to keep building on there so we don't lose that balance in the focus towards digital growth as well. I think for us we're thinking about as a brand that cares a lot about entertainment. It's like, how does that translate in a physical environment? So we also do a lot with events, but then it's like thinking about how are we using our screens, how are we really bringing the soul of the brand to life in that environment? So for example, we make a show called The Trinny Takeover Show, and it's playing on our screens in retail and it's like, you don't expect someone to sit and watch a 20-minute episode, but we're trying to make those environments as similar as they can be. They're never going to be the same, but trying to really bring that special sort of spark to life in retail. The only thing addition for us, and Manju said some great things earlier as well about stores are not just there to buy things, but you have an experience which which the guys have said. But we used to spend almost all of our time creating marketing things or advertising for the customer, but we now spend more time training our store staff, store managers to be the voice of advertising in the same persuasive, crafted, concise way that that great copy might be. And they now have, I mean, they're empowered there to be evangelists for the brand, but also have the best relationships with every customer that walks in. So spending much more time on clienteling and relationships, on how they can be data-driven and relationship-driven, use messaging apps or email to develop those relationships, but be the voice of the brand just like the advertising could be. How's that change around thinking around the types of people that you have working in your stores then? Somewhat the types of people, but how they're empowered that they're not there to sell things, the sale comes on the back of something else, there's a lot more training, a lot of different kinds of recruitment. So I don't think it's necessarily different people, but a different type of person we recruit for that might be great on their feet or great at improv or an extrovert or just really interested in cashmere or something of that, but there's less good salespeople, but more evangelists for the story.