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The Importance of Trends in Retail

By Francisco Alvarez - Getin
CCO and Co-Founder

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By Francisco Álvarez | CCO and Co-Founder - Wed, 01/25/2023 - 09:00

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Retail is the industry with the most traditional history, and it certainly has been relevant since the beginning of commerce as a fundamental economic activity.

In the 21st century, the evaluation of purchasing processes and the conception of the development of brand awareness has marked the difference between retail companies. Activities related to marketing, advertising, and customer experience became relevant in the approach to sales. As such, the basic rules of  transactional activity changed.

The development of these concepts within the industry set a precedent in the way in which brands built their fundamentals. Retailers took advantage in combination with a seasonal strategy according to each sector.

In the last decade, with the penetration of digital channels in retail, understanding trends in social networks and the social context in which buyers are involved has become vital to establish a true relationship between consumers and brands. This has great importance because it is the trigger to make a purchase.

Observe and Listen to the Consumer

Although it seems basic, paying attention to the customer’s needs is necessarily as relevant as it should be for retail brands. This is a serious mistake.

These days, the playing field between consumers and brands is constantly changing. This is derived from the immediacy of how social media works in the battle to gain more attention from each user.

This pushes brands to focus their efforts on constantly knowing their consumers, especially those brands that use tools from the digital world as part of their sales strategy.

An example of failing to take advantage of a trend was the soccer World Cup in Qatar.

During the last few months, we have been monitoring the behavior of retail in Mexican brick-and-mortar stores. We observed that in these months  and on the days when the Mexican team played, the indicators showed no significant variations.

The influx and sales indicators maintained the typical behavior expected during these months, which leads us to infer that stores in Mexico generally missed the euphoria of the World Cup to add promotions, discount strategies, or related dynamics to sustain buyers' attention.

The Applied Use of the Trend

Brands with physical stores are experiencing an era of change, where digital channels have become a reliable source of information for buyers. Influencers have a large percentage of purchase conversion to position a brand among their community.

A structured marketing department that is constantly researching how buyers are impacted by the trends of the digital world can give a clear advantage over how products are marketed, based on the fact that a brand can have organic participation in that trend context without being a leading actor.

The fast fashion, wearables, and accessories sectors are taking advantage of collaborations with influencers to launch new products together. This is an example of how a trending person can become an ambassador for a brand or a specific product.

At Getin, we have analyzed several digital marketing campaigns and the impact they have directly on the physical point of sale and, therefore, its indicators, such as store visits and sales.

In our research, we have found the most impact on sales and influx to a store is produced by the collaborations of brands with influencers. Using trendsetters to promote a product has the highest ROI.

Another way to add a marketing strategy to the buyer's environment is to use the current social and cultural context and take it to the context of a store.

This is a common and even unconscious practice in the industry due to the very nature of retail. Today, retailers know the low and high seasons of consumption for their stores.

Retailers have found that participating in these detected seasonalities helps them boost their sales, especially in low-traffic seasons.

For this reason, it is common to see advertising campaigns on all their channels, based on characteristic elements of each season to engage their buyers.

This practice has been very common for years and stores are already used to executing it, so a marketing strategy based on trends is already natural for retailers.

The challenge that brands have today is to renew these strategies to optimize the budget allocated to marketing in a way that optimizes the results generated.

Digital marketing and social ads allow brands to carry out trend-based micro-campaigns for shorter seasons than a comprehensive campaign based on a strong sales season.

This makes digital marketing the natural ally for retail brands to motivate more social interactions.

The key to success is to quickly adapt resources to a trend aligned with the value's brand. The downside of following social trends is that they can quickly lose relevance with the emergence of a new trend.

Another important point to consider is that retailers need to think about a campaign of this type from their digital approach and not try to adapt or replicate a campaign carried out for the physical channel because this does not work. Buyers do not perceive the message in the  same way on both channels. Although the communication objective is the same, the way it is presented must be directed to the channel in which it is being communicated.

Photo by:   Francisco Alvarez

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