Physical Retail is Dead. Or is it?
How physical stores can be good for your brand, even if everyone else is struggling.
Stores are closing in their thousands across the world, and yet there are direct to consumer (DTC) brands opening a small number of physical stores. Companies like Allbirds and Deciem/ The Ordinary.
Physical stores can make financial sense, increasing sales in the region and purchases by loyal customers. More powerfully, they can be the embodiment of the brand for customers and the business itself. But crucially, don’t open too many of them.
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The Poison Chalice of Coolness
Or: how to avoid your one-way ticket to irrelevance
We live in extraordinary times, where new, digitally-activated startup brands continually topple the hegemony of big-business with unruffled ease. The product landscape in many consumer categories already looks unrecognisable compared to just a few years ago - and when Fever-Tree tonic replaces Schweppes even on board British Airways flights, you know that no holy cow is safe anymore. How fabulously exciting that is.
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Are agencies unintentional incubators?
It’s hard to feel an iota of sympathy for the legions of Suits complaining about how hard it is for ‘creative agencies’ these days.
But consider for a moment the thinkers and craftspeople stuck in that quicksand - confronted daily by risk averse ‘managers’, sour lemonade budgets, cocaine expectations, and slag heaps of data.
Perhaps then it’s no surprise that some of the most interesting challenger brands have been/are being conceived by agency creatives sick to the back teeth of big clients who don’t listen.
Post Category: WHAT
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