A Model Marketing Communications Program for The North Face - Case Study Example

A Model Marketing Communications Program for The North Face Introduction This paper will present a basic marketing communications model, which is applied to The North Face, a well-known retailer of adventure sports apparel and equipment. The North Face was selected for this exercise because of its unique product mix; the company has traditionally focused on a specific niche – climbing, snow sports, hiking, and expedition enthusiasts – but can expand into the larger sportswear market, where the label is already popular. Company Background The company is named “for the coldest, most unforgiving side of a mountain”, according to The North Face website (“Our Story”, 2009), which also notes the irony that the original idea was formed in the noticeably un-mountainous North Beach neighbourhood of San Francisco. The company’s founders were hiking enthusiasts, and so their original focus was to retail hiking and mountaineering equipment. The North Face enhanced its brand reputation throughout the 1970s by sponsoring mountaineering expeditions, and expanded into ski wear and equipment during the 1980s. Since then, the company has gradually increased its product range into clothing and footwear as well. The North Face operates several dozen retail stores throughout North America and Europe, and has several hundred authorised vendors worldwide. The company is strongly committed to Internet sales and maintains a number of websites; in 2006, The North Face acquired Virgin.net’s winter sports channel, and has since aimed to achieve a 50-50 balance between Internet and traditional marketing efforts. (“The North Face looks to move half its marketing budget online”, 2006) This Internet focus will naturally be a significant component of the proposed marketing communications model. Step One: Identifying a Target Audience The most effective way to identify a target audience is to clearly define the market segments into which the company’s products fit, or in other words, develop a clear profile of the company’s existing customers. Market segments can either be observable or unobservable, and either general or product-specific. Observable general factors such as cultural, demographic, and economic characteristics along with product-specific factors such as purchasing behaviour can be measured (Wedel & Kamakura, 2000: 7); from the changing values of these in response to different products and methods of presentation, the unobservable factors of values, lifestyle, personalities, and intentions of the customer base can be inferred, and a typical customer profile developed. The typical North Face customer could be described in these terms: Physically active – enjoys outdoor activities. Fairly young – certainly below retirement age, and likely between the ages of 18 and 45. Middle-class income or higher – has resources to spend on leisure and recreation. Environmentally-conscious. Socially-conscious. More brand- and quality-oriented than price-oriented. Once the profile of the existing customer is developed, the company must make a judgment whether the products it wishes to market will appeal to this market segment, or if new segments will have to be found. This is not exactly the case for The North Face, but the company will have to find ways to appeal to a broader range of customers, people who fit the profile, but to perhaps lesser degrees than the mountain-climbing, winter sports, and adventure enthusiasts with which the brand is ordinarily associated. Step Two: Choose a Product Position One way this can be done is to determine the general characteristics that appeal to the customer profile. For The North Face’s products, these would be: Durability – good quality and construction, able to stand up to active use. Stylish – appealing to contemporary adult tastes. Responsible – brand not associated with poor labour practises, etc. Observing customer characteristics to determine what is appealing – or in a word, “cool” – is valuable, but can be overdone. The concept is called “coolhunting”, and The North Face is a typical practitioner of it. (Southgate, 2003) It involves seeking out and identifying what is “cool”, and then associating the brand with that; often this involves association with particular individuals or activities, such as The North Face’s promotion of mountain expeditions involving well-known climbers and adventurers. Fully half of the company’s website is devoted to multimedia presentations of various daring activities; the current headliner is a winter expedition to climb Makalu, the fifth-highest mountain in the world. (“Explore”, 2009) This is intended to lend a certain mystique or “cool” to the brand, but it can easily backfire if the brand becomes so “cool” as to become a cliché. A recent example of this is the case of a young student in Missouri, whose irritation with his classmates’ slavish adherence to The North Face label as a status symbol led him to start a small, and reportedly very profitable, company called “The South Butt” mocking the trend. (Netter, 2009) The filing of a lawsuit against the teenager by The North Face for trademark infringement has if anything only fuelled his success. Rather than chasing “cool”, which in a sense puts the product position constantly behind what is currently popular, a better solution is to establish “cool” by emphasising practicality in the sense that the product is “right” for any situation in which the targeted consumer is likely to find himself. (Southgate, 2003) Thus in the case of The North Face’s products, the best emphasis would be on the product virtues represented; for example, what a pair of The North Face walking shorts has in common with a high-altitude survival suit being used in a Himalayan ascent. Step Three: Decide on a Consistent Set of Measures for the Communication Plan Rick Wise and Niren Sirohi of the consulting firm Lippincott-Mercer stress this as the first of six guidelines for developing a marketing mix. (Wise & Sirohi, 2005) Any investment must have a return, and this is certainly true of an investment in marketing communications as well. Because The North Face has focused at least half of their marketing budget on the Internet (“The North Face looks to move half its marketing budget online”, 2006), a set of trackable measures is relatively easy to develop. Some suggestions are: Sales of the targeted products through the online stores. Overall number of website visitors, and numbers of visitors to specific parts of the websites. The relationship between an Internet marketing campaign and sales of the targeted products. If for example The North Face chooses to highlight footwear in their online campaign, the success of the campaign can be inferred from an increase in sales of footwear. This can be verified with follow-up customer surveys. The information from the surveys plus adjustments for seasonal or economic factors that play a role can be used to quantify the ROI of the marketing campaign. Sales in retail stores attributable to customers’ viewing the Internet campaign. This can also be verified through customer surveys. Step Four: Experimentation Once a set of metrics has been decided, variations of the Internet marketing communications plan should be tested. (Wise & Sirohi, 2005) Presumably, the company will have a specific ROI target in mind for the campaign, but the proposed plan may not meet the objective. By the same token, a slightly-different version of the plan may actually be able to exceed the objective. Neither of these questions can be answered without testing the program, and so the company must be willing to do that, even if that means setting aside an apparently successful version for a short time in order to test another. Basing the marketing communications campaign on the Internet makes testing relatively easy, however, since web pages can be changed quickly with minimal cost and effort, unlike traditional marketing involving print and broadcast advertising and store signage and displays. Step Five: Support the Campaign with other Marketing Tools, and Vice Versa This is one area in which The North Face has already developed a strong program, and so this step will involve little more than making small refinements to address new content in the Internet campaign. In The North Face retail stores, the company worked with Microsoft to build “digital kiosks” to showcase its product line with the extensive film footage of the many adventure expeditions the company sponsors around the world. (“The North Face”, 2007) By tying the websites into the in-store kiosks, the company can present its full product line in every store, regardless of the on-site inventory. Another way in which the real-world store and Internet marketing efforts can mutually support each other is to offer customer incentives to encourage shopping in the “other” store. For example, store customers can be offered an incentive towards their next purchase via the Internet, while customers of the Internet store can be offered an incentive to visit their local store. Summary of the Marketing Communications Plan This paper presents a model for developing a marketing communications plan for The North Face’s apparel and footwear, in five steps which can be summarised thus: 1. Find the Target Audience: The basic customer profile that applies to The North Face’s core customer base of outdoor sports and adventure enthusiasts also applies to a much larger population. Efforts must be made to reach out to these people and encourage them to visit The North Face. Using the Internet, this can be done by targeted advertising on different websites or in search engines. 2. Position the Product: The product position envisioned by this model is one of value, with the brand prestige derived not so much from its association with celebrity or trendiness, but rather high quality and function. The customer considering buying a pair of walking shorts to spend a day at the park, for example, should get the message that the same practicality and strength of The North Face products that can keep climbers alive at 8,000 metres in the dead of winter means his shorts will look good and function well no matter what he plans to do while wearing them. 3. Choose a Method to Evaluate the Marketing Effort: A consistent set of measures that can be applied to any variation of the program is critical to determining its value and ROI. 4. Experiment with Different Plans: Wise and Sirohi (2005) describe this as “looking over the fence”. A particular program may be successful and meet the company’s expectations and objectives, but a different version may be more successful; there is no way to tell unless it is tried. If the first three steps have been correctly achieved, testing different ideas becomes relatively quick and easy. 5. Use the Plan as Part of a ‘Whole Enterprise’ Approach: The Internet-based marketing communications should support brick-and-mortar operations and vice-versa. Making incentives and promotional tie-ins to encourage customers to move back-and-forth between the digital and physical stores enhances the effectiveness of both. How Does This Differ from The North Face’s Current Approach? The biggest differences between what this model suggests and what The North Face is doing now in terms of its Internet marketing are in terms of expanding its product appeal and presenting more integrated online content. Currently, the company’s website is divided into two parts: visitors that wish to shop for clothing and other products can select the online store, or if they are simply interested in some of the many activities sponsored or promoted by the company they can select the “Explore” side of the website. While there are of course links from the non-shopping pages to the online store, a better approach would be to combine them so that there is no real difference between shopping and ‘just visiting’ the website. In addition, the clothing and products that are shown “in action” are almost completely devoted to mountaineering and other extreme adventures. The connection to hard-core adventure could still be made, but in a way that more people could relate to; for example, emphasis could be placed on The North Face’s apparel that mountaineers wear when they’re not scaling dangerous peaks. Adding some content that has broader appeal – not all of The North Face’s potential customers are necessarily mountain-climbers, after all – would help to increase customer traffic. References “Explore”. (2009) The North Face [website]. . Netter, S. (2009) “The North Face vs. The South Butt: Entrepreneurial Teen Undaunted by Lawsuit Threat”. ABC News [Internet], 1 October 2009. . “Our Story”. (2009) The North Face [website]. . Southgate, N. (2003) “Coolhunting, account planning and the ancient cool of Aristotle”. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 21(7): 453-461. Available from Emerald: . “The North Face”. (2007) Microsoft Case Studies [Internet], 6 March 2007. . “The North Face looks to move half its marketing budget online”. (2006) New Media Age, 26 October 2006. [Internet] Available from Goliath: . Wedel, M., and Kamakura, W.A. (2000) Market Segmentation: Conceptual and Methodological Foundations. Norwell, Massachusetts: Kluwer Academic. Wise, R., and Sirohi, N. (2005) “Finding the best marketing mix”. Journal of Business Strategy, 26(6): 10-11. Available from Emerald: . Read More