In fashion, perhaps more than anywhere else, branding is everything.
Many fashion brands have spent decades building up a unique but delicate brand image: they often rely on staying enigmatic, using aspirational photography and inspired physical stores to differentiate.
In an increasingly online world, this imposes a problem. Success in e-commerce is determined by laws of conversion, use of conventions and by enabling choice. Not by exceeding expectations and offering serendipity. This is why all profitable online fashion stores look more and more the same.
In this talk, Pieter Jongerius will bring together the worlds of fashion, touchpoint strategy and e-commerce design. After this talk, you will have learnt a very concrete approach to obtaining success in fashion e-commerce, illustrated with recent best practices.
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Fashion E-commerce - Branding vs. Conversion (SXSW14 talk)
1. 1
- Pieter Jongerius -
FASHION E-COMMERCE
CONVERSION VS. BRANDING?
Survival of the fittest
2. 2@PIETERJ / #BRANDCONF
In fashion, perhaps more than anywhere else, branding is everything.
Many fashion brands have spent decades building up a unique but delicate brand
image: they often rely on staying enigmatic, using aspirational photography and
inspired physical stores to differentiate.
In an increasingly online world, this imposes a problem. Success in e-commerce is
determined by laws of conversion, use of conventions and by enabling choice. Not
by exceeding expectations and offering serendipity. This is why all profitable
online fashion stores look more and more the same.
In this talk, Pieter Jongerius will bring together the worlds of fashion,
touchpoint strategy and e-commerce design. After this talk, you will have learnt
a very concrete approach to obtaining success in fashion e-commerce, illustrated
with recent best practices.
5. @PIETERJ / #BRANDCONF 5
I often compare the challenge that our clients have with that of birds of paradise.
They have to comply to a lot of things, like having wings and little legs.
But they also have the need to find ways to stand out and create a difference between themselves and their competitors
6. In Fashion, as in many industries, our main way of creating a difference is through our products.
7. But as soon as we start communicating, we all use the same visual language.
And that’s a language that Coco Chanel has introduced in 1924
12. So for H&M, its relatively simple to associate themselves with higher-end fashion brands by doing the same.
13. Even Diesel, who recently tried a significantly different style,
14. …are conforming in more recent work again to the format: Big photo, small logo
Is that me-too behavior? Or really the best way to convey emotion and attitude?
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Even net-a-porter know that they have to use a lot of room as soon as they enter the physical realm.
33. 33@PIETERJ / #BRANDCONF
Conversion is koning.…branding!
We have to acknowledge the fact that conversion is also branding.
Evidently, someone is had a good enough user experience to actually buy something.
However: our goal is to improve conversion AND create a difference.
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Consider this car, and how we always complain that all cars increasingly look the same. Causes for this are the forces of
nature, Wind, gravity, but also legislation. In our case: brain capacity. Creating overview, estimation of goal achievement,
etc. …And there’s another reason.
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Back to the first car.
Who knows what type of car this is? How did you see? Yes, the tail light.
THAT is the place where the car designers found room to differentiate.
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?
So if birds and cars have found their places of freedom as well as their constraints,
how does that work with fashion web shops?
And we’ll go into that.
40. How do our minds work?
@PIETERJ / #BRANDCONF 40
41. FAIL
CONVERSION
SOURCE: BJ FOGG BEHAVIORMODEL.ORG (SIMPIFIED)
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USER ABILITY
MOTIVATION
WIN
MOTIVATION
USABILITY
boring but important
fun!
Suppose above the orange
line is a win, so the
customer buys.
Below the line we fail, the
customer doesn't buy.
Conversion is achieved by
increasing ability (or
usability). Boring but
important. It leads to
convention, as we’ve seen.
But conversion is also
increased by increasing
motivation. And that’s much
more fun! Because
increasing motivation
requires innovation and
doing something different.
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Aaker (1987) has created a map of personality characteristics. With these, we might describe Karl as being
original yet sentimental, cool yet imaginative, intelligent yet charming.
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?
How do we create difference?
We’re already narrowing down and we’ve seen the three areas we can work on:
60. appearance
product information
trust & reassurance
SEO
UI patterns
grids
product photography
web-safe fonts
the “fold”
devices
communication
behavior
brand
personality
assortment
price & promotions
conditions
mobile
e-mail
facebook
new arrivals
mail & social
sale
We still have all these constraints that are so common to ecommerce.
61. appearance
product information
trust & reassurance
SEO
UI patterns
grids
product photography
web-safe fonts
the “fold”
devices
communication
behavior
brand
personality
assortment
price & promotions
conditions
mobile
e-mail
facebook
new arrivals
mail & social
sale
But there is room beyond all of these!!
We’ll now go through these three dimensions, one by one.
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Rapha, a Dutch sports wear brand, tells stories accompanying many of their products.
By doing this in a relevant way, they create added value.
77. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
Commerce
Advice
Relation
Community
Emotion
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These areas we defined together with a large Dutch retailer.
We’ll briefly go through them.
78. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
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79. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
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What you sell determines not only
your business but also many other
factors, such as how you look.
80. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
80@PIETERJ / #BRANDCONF
Use the properties of your collection
to create something unique, Greats
Brand shoes do that.
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Selling just one product? You have all freedom of the world :)
This effect can be a reason to launch temporary candy shops (as I call them) for a limited collection
82. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
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83. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
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If you have a unique way or see a
chance of providing advice, this is
an excellent way to differentiate.
84. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
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fitsme.com
Fitsme claim: each visit yielda
around $10 in increased conversion
and diminished returns.
86. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
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87. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
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Again, the UK startup Brandit is a
great example.
88. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
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They have an on-boarding process
called MALE
89. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
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After registering, there is no shop.
Just a chat engine in which you can
ask your question.
90. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
90@PIETERJ / #BRANDCONF
So, when waking in the city, your
phone may buzz and your personal
shopper might come back to you
with a suggestion!
91. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
91@PIETERJ / #BRANDCONF
A couple of years ago, we all
thought the world would move into
profiling and customization
Right now I see a movement
towards human interaction
The cloakroom a nice example from
Amsterdam.
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Co-creation. Participative design.
The brand and audience
that make together, stay together.
Even if WE’re personally done with words like participative design and cocreation,
this is still a large area of branding & conversion opportunity
98. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
Somewhat disappointing:
92% of retailers share social media
insight with their marketing
department
53% with customer service
36% with product development
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99. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
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Finally, as a brand, you might aim to
elicit emotions and create
associations based on that.
100. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
100@PIETERJ / #BRANDCONF
Like Uniqlo. They have a strong
history of lifestyle apps that
underline the brand
101. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
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Such as the wakeup app, that
actually wakes you up by singing
the weather for you
102. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
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…the gorgeous calendar app…
103. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
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…and currently, their Lifewear
cooking app, pairing food with
music and fashion.
104. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
· Commerce
· Advice
· Relation
· Community
· Emotion
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However, when using the app, the
link to lifewear is not clear and kind
of hidden.
105. BRANDING BY ADDING VALUE
Commerce
Advice
Relation
Community
Emotion
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107. DON’T MESS WITH…
· Main navigation
· Basket top-right
· Scannable and
scrollable PLP
· Filters left,
maybe top
· Clean PDP layout
· Size guides &
measurements
· The “fold”
· ..the buttons.
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Get creative?
Watch out, dont mess with things like these.
May seem trivial but I see so many shops violating this!
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Designers Victor & Rolf, being a bit perky, decided to ignore all conventions and wanted us to create a round website.
But then again, they’re not selling anything :)
116. @PIETERJ / #BRANDCONF 116
When we were asked to create the design for their web store, all the briefing we got was: go visit our store.
That’s what we want to see online.
118. This is the homepage. It was one of our earliest sketches and they wanted it quite badly, even though it went against all
rules and conventions for a homepage. Actually it worked very well and had a very low bounce rate.
However after a year, we all got a bit tired of it, so now it’s been replaced anyway.
119. Beyond that, our client wanted a bright shop that looked dark.
Because it is urban myth that bright shops convert better than dark shops.
So we worked very hard with lighting…
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Mallett, London and NY based, one of the world foremost Antiques dealer.
They performed a major market innovation: selling online.
130. @PIETERJ / #BRANDCONF 130
To underline accessablity, we designed the shop tablet first.
Large scale controls, very little on the screen at a single time.
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We even crafted a custom typeface to reflect tradition and innovation at the same time.
132. This is about as far as we’d go in deviating from conventional interface patterns.
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So why is this happening?
Fakes are taking over. Because the logo is almost all they had.
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Louis Vuitton goes logo free in China
“At the risk of shocking everyone, the [rate of]
sales growth at Louis Vuitton is not a problem,”
said LVMH Chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault at
a shareholders’ meeting, stating that slow growth
was part of the company’s “deliberate strategy”
to become more exclusive.
141. So they’re improving branding by removing their logo, think about it.
What elements are you overusing that helped you in the past?
145. 145@PIETERJ / #BRANDCONF
So what if you know a four-column list page will convert better, but you think 3 colums look better?
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What if your designer comes up with an innovative way to turn products,
but you fear that some customers will not understand?
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A/B tests.
which test won.com
What if you know conversion will
increase if you show a mailing list
lightbox, but you really hate them
yourself?
Then you do AB tests! Most ecommerce
managers report that they’re not doing
them, or not enough.
Go, people!
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Video is just for fans
Research that the Dutch research agency Netmarketing did shows:
Only fans will enjoy them. As long as they’re placed outside of the essential click paths, they won’t hurt other users.
Until now, we could measure no positive effect on conversion, but it may be there for fans.
157. DARE TO DIFFER UNDERSTAND TONE OF VOICE INNOVATE
LOOK DIFFERENT INSPIRE (A BIT) NO DILEMMAS SURVIVE & THRIVE
To sum it up, these are the 8 things you need to know and do to become succesful AND be different online.
158. @PIETERJ / #BRANDCONF 158
I hope this talk will help you find the competitive edge that really fits YOU.
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all content copyright of their respective owners
brands, design & interaction
We are investing in international business. Don’t hesitate to contact us.
Pieter
Jongerius
@pieterj
160. 160@PIETERJ / #BRANDCONF
Pieter Jongerius is a partner at the Dutch design agency Fabrique.
Originally an Industrial Design Engineer, he specialized in web design as early
as 1996, with a special interest in interaction, strategy and methodology.
Fabrique specializes in strategic design for cross channel B2C communications
and employs around 100 people.
In recent years Pieter has specialized in retail & e-commerce and has done
award winning work for national and international companies such as
Heineken, Sony Music, SuperTrash, Hunkemöller, The Sting and more.
Pieter is main author of the book "Get Agile! Scrum for UX and Development"
and has been a pioneer of using Scrum in design and development projects since
2008.