We Play in Traffic

Social media has become the topic of the day in retail marketing.  Lots of conversation about retail use of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and more.

There’s a mad dash towards doing something.  But the question is: what to do?

We thought a first step might be to define where a retail brand would fit on a matrix that could help guide its view of social media, including whether to use it all.

This matrix has two axes:

One, we’ll call “frequency.” This is how often the consumer interacts with your store.  Typically, how often they shop at your store, but in the case of banking, “shopping” may be the wrong way to describe it.  Some stores are shopped frequently (perhaps you go to Starbucks every day).  Some infrequently (think mattress retailers).

The other axis we’ll call “engagement.” Engagement is the emotional affinity with your retail brand; being a member of the “club” of people that see themselves as emotionally aligned with your retail brand.  Many of these are retailers that sell their own branded items: Nike, Coldwater Creek, Crate & Barrel, Apple.  Brands with low engagement may be those selling “commodities,” like gas stations or auto parts.

Matrix to aid with social media usage

Those axes give us four quadrants.  These quadrants may be a guide for how to think about your store’s use of social media.  Once you’ve located your store on this map, we’ve added some views that could help in your thinking about what to do with social and other interactive media:

High frequency/high engagement retail brands:  examples are Starbucks and Whole Foods.

What to do:  this quadrant is the sweet-spot for social media.  It should be treated as a real opportunity to engage customers as friends, confidants, lovers.  And let them engage with each other as frequent fans of your brand.  To do it well, you may need someone interacting in the social space all day.  Answering questions, offering insights, dishing news; Whole Foods has 14 Tweets in the past 4 hours (and 1,459,000 followers).  But then again, Starbucks only posts on Facebook every day or so.  They let their 4,288,000 Facebook fans do most of the talking; about once every few minutes it appears.

Low frequency/high engagement retail brands:  examples are Coldwater Creek, Swatch.

What to do:  Amplify the “brand badge” in social media.  It’s likely these brands already have a strong affinity market – you can buy a blouse or a watch at lots of places but shoppers of these stores are drawn because they see themselves as members of the club that is these brands.  They are fans.  Fans use Facebook.  Swatch rewards its 68,000 Facebook fans with musings about and access to creativity (its brand badge?).  Coldwater Creek has no fan page.

High frequency/low engagement retail brands:  examples are 7-Eleven, gas stations and other “convenience” type outlets.

What do to:  Use borrowed interest to create higher engagement.  Face it, people are largely going to your store because it’s “there.”  If another store were “there” instead they’d shop at that store.  Social media is a challenge, but things like frequency contests or “Twitter-only sales” could create some interest.  Looks like 7-Eleven is now back on Facebook after abandoning over a hundred thousand fans months ago and only has 198 Twitter followers.  Maybe this is a way for 7-Eleven to get re-engaged.

Low frequency/low engagement retail brands:  examples are mattress and furniture stores, remodeling outlets.

What to do:  Focus on awareness and search presence.  That’s right: don’t focus on social media.  It’s a giant uphill battle.  You’d be better served making sure that your brand is readily found when your category is searched.  That means strong SEO and SEM efforts.  Maybe with a skew to geo-location (see my blog on that).

The next question might be: which social media site is best for your store.  But, this is getting long already.  So that will be the subject of another episode of We Play In Traffic.