It’s important to understand now how your digital media is having an impact in stores
Sandra Kennedy, Harry Rosen
As director of marketing at Harry Rosen, Sandra Kennedy knows a thing or two about delivering a premium experience. She is both a luxury sector advertiser and publisher of Harry, the upscale fashion retailer’s branded magazine, giving her a unique perspective on both sides of the media equation.
As part of a larger conversation around Context Matters, an in-depth study by Rogers Insights, in partnership with the Canadian Marketing Association, Globe Media Group and Marketing, Kennedy recently shared her insights on digital advertising, her definition of premium and what works for a brand that’s not afraid to take risks.
As an advertiser, how do you define premium?
We have to be careful with that word, because it’s not necessarily what we see as premium. Here’s an analogy. Everyone thinks that they offer a quality cotton t-shirt, but how quality is it – organic cotton, pima cotton, cotton-poly? The value is in the eyes of the beholder.
What’s your overarching approach to digital advertising?
We do a lot of display and video advertising from a brand awareness standpoint. Our goal is to ensure we are present at the right moment to capture attention. The benefit with anything digital is the ability to test and learn, and we always ask a lot of questions to our agency and regularly review and monitor the results. We also invest heavily in SEM [search engine marketing] activities to make sure we are present at all stages of the funnel.
How do you evaluate decisions and protect a brand like Harry Rosen online?
We test a lot of premium sites; it’s about drilling down in terms of who they’re targeting. And then, of course, what the content is on a site and whether or not it’s the right environment for us to run advertising in. It also comes down to value — how we’re measuring the site or the creative’s performance and the cost, in comparison to other sites. We rely heavily upon our media planners to go through line by line and provide us with the rationale for even trying [a site].
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Any surprises?
We’ve tested sites that are specifically about men’s fashion versus news and business sites, and the news and business sites win out over fashion sites. But we have such a broad audience. I like to think every man thinks that Harry Rosen is specifically for him — the average age is 38 — so it covers quite a spectrum of customers. Some of those men’s fashion sites are relevant to a younger audience, so we have to be cognisant of that too. It’s a bit of a balancing act.
How does having your own advertising platform help?
It goes back to content. We are publishers. We publish our own magazine, Harry, twice a year and we have Harry’s Notebook on our site. Harry’s Notebook is our blog, and we post regular stories about men’s fashion, how-tos, the like, and have done so since the site went up. We’re in the business of educating men about menswear.
How do evaluate success online?
It keeps changing and there are different things we can measure. And what’s being measured is changing. Success online varies dependent on the tactic utilized. For example, for video advertising, we look at metrics such as video completion rates and cost per view (and have subsequently shortened our videos). For any SEM activities, we look at cost per click and on-site engagement metrics to measure success.
As an omni-channel retailer, I think it’s important to understand now how your digital media is having an impact in stores. To take advantage of the traffic to the site and assist our customers, we introduced a new widget to our site that allows customers to chat with a clothing advisor while they are online, or access an in-store clothing advisor of their choice. That way, their clothing advisor can make the shopping process a lot easier and efficient.
How do you find the sweet spot between making the most of digital’s ever-evolving capabilities and adhering to a budget?
It’s important to learn from what you’ve done. For instance, we’ve changed the length of our videos as attention span has decreased, and our buy has changed accordingly. We look to past performing sites, always testing to see what is working, and moving the budget around to take advantage of it. So we monitor it all the time, allowing time to see if it will gain traction, but change our buy if we need to. And we set aside 10% of the budget to test new things that are always being offered up.
