Choosing to ignore the digital aspects of direct marketing will likely earn your brand the consumers’ collective cold shoulder. Just ask The North Face and Patagonia — two outdoor apparel retailers with distinct customer approaches that effectively blend e-commerce efforts with catalog mailings.
Patagonia, however, appears to use its e-commerce site more ?effectively to interact with and serve brand enthusiasts than to drive sales. The company goes out of its way to advertise its environmentalism via its “The Cleanest Line” blog and “Our Common Waters” activism campaign, a tactic which clearly positions the brand to ?appeal to the environmentally-aware consumer. Enthusiasm on the site is evident; user-generated reviews run aplenty and each product has its own dedicated Quora-like question-and-answer section where ?consumers interact.
Should a customer find a product without user-generated feedback, a Patagonia live chat operator will ask if he can help within minutes. Unfortunately, the sales push on the site is inferior to the branding effort. For example, Patagonia jams 48 small images of jackets onto the jackets landing page. As a result, none stand out.
North Face, on the other hand, only lists nine jackets on its jackets’ Web page, with each photo large enough to adequately display the product without an additional click. This may seem like a trivial distinction, but for the casual customer browsing jackets on both these close competitors’ sites, North Face’s products are ?much easier to view.
That doesn’t mean the North Face site is perfect. The brand does little to spur interactions; a live chat representative is not offered and customers are urged to leave reviews via inconspicuous tabs to the right of each product. As a result, the majority of products contain few reviews, if any.
Adam Ketcheson, director of brand management at North Face, agrees that there is more work to be done. “Any way we can continue to build our community and reviews is always a high priority for anybody in our space,” he says. In fact, it expects to revamp its e-commerce offering in the second quarter to “make our website easy to navigate for the consumer.”
“The North Face provides a simpler, visually superior shopping experience,” adds Bill Hustad, VP of customers at Baynote, an ?e-commerce services provider. “Its site offers stark color contrast; things pop out more. The thumbnails are much bigger than Patagonia’s.”
Dave Kerpen, CEO of social media marketing firm Likeable Media, agrees that “most customers appreciate a simpler design as opposed to clutter,” but he praises Patagonia’s live chat as “more ?important to me as a consumer.”
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