Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Living Advertorials... Meaning, Digital Advertorials

Retail is dying. Well, the old retail is dying, leaving brands scrambling to figure out how to keep customers walking through their doors. Younger brands have the advantage of testing out new ideas, and some to great success. One overarching goal of these new retail experiences is that all brands are looking for ways to encourage their clients to take selfies or photos of the store interior, and share them on social media.

The lengths to which the brands go to to provide a sharable in-store experience cannot be underestimated. From optimal selfie lighting, to incorporating perfume-spraying robots into a fragrance launch, the experience is prioritized. Brands have started hiring set design professionals to accomplish the theatrical, experiential layout they want their stores to have. More than anything, though, the customer has to be able to capture a bit of the experience so that they can share on social, known affectionately as user-generated content.

The importance of user-generated content (UGC) also cannot be underestimated. Word-of-mouth is still the most powerful endorsement for a product or experience, and UGC does just that, and the ability to spread-the-word is made all too easy by social media. Of course, this works for both good and bad endorsements, but the idea is that if the in-store experience is really good, the customer will be happy to share, and someone else will see, go and have a similar experience and share, and on and on it goes, until people tire of that experience and the retailer needs to reinvent the experience to start the cycle over again.

https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/professional/turning-physical-stores-into-living-advertorials

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