FutureShop.ca has been selling products outside of the consumer electronics realm since 2011, but a lot of consumers don’t know that.
To help generate awareness of its “expanded assortment” – which includes categories such as health, beauty and baby products – the retailer recently posted videos on its social channels to let Canadians know FutureShop.ca is more than TVs and computers.
Future Shop’s sister company Best Buy Canada recently launched an e-commerce brand called Viva that also sells lifestyle products (some of which are from brands FutureShop.ca also carries, such as Burt’s Bees).
Aliya Reynolds, director of marketing at both Future Shop and Best Buy Canada, said that Viva was created because Best Buy over-indexes on females more than the Future Shop brand, “so we wanted to create [Viva] to speak to that target more vertically.”
While Future Shop doesn’t have a separate brand through which it sells lifestyle goods (Viva is exclusive to Best Buy Canada), it did want to get the word out to consumers that it sells more than just electronics online. (It currently offers more than 12,000 SKUs under the expanded assortment umbrella.)
To do so, it developed the creative for the three “Good To Know” videos in-house with Future Shop’s marketing team. The videos were produced by Vancouver’s Hank Studios, marking the first time Future Shop has worked with the production house and creative digital agency.
The videos all start off with random factoids and the hope is that people find them interesting enough that they’ll share them with their friends, said Reynolds.
It’s a pure digital strategy with no plans for a TV component, she said. “We wanted [the videos] to be really short and snappy and engaging,” she said. “The main message is delivered at the end that you can find all of these great things that you didn’t know about on FutureShop.ca.”
In addition to running the videos on Future Shop’s own social channels, the company also has a digital media buy on YouTube that will run for four to five weeks, said Reynolds. The online planning and buying was handled internally, she said.
