Where Content Meets Commerce

Net-a-Porter.com showcases top luxury fashion designers

This is a phrase that we’ve increasingly been using within our business. It takes in a plethora of live issues: brands as media owners; measurement and analytics; the role of content in e-commerce; the evolving nature of SEO … and allows us to examine the role of content in bringing customers to the retail environment.

This article from David Carr in yesterday’s The New York Times underlines the growing realization within brands themselves of the need for a content strategy when it comes to their developing e-commerce businesses. And it also recognizes the unique skills that editorial and journalism bring to the in-house creative process. Catalogers have long recognized that great design and punchy copywriting bring results, and the evaluation and measurement processes (“squinch” = sales per square inch, in case you needed reminding) of those skills have always been foremost in their minds. Mind you, if you were printing and mailing millions of catalogs, then you would be pretty negligent not to be focused on ROI.

But what the Times article reminds us is that the Web provides us with the chance to experiment a little—and it gives us the chance to flex our creative muscles while testing the results of our work in real time. This is the great and liberating opportunity offered by the online environment.

So, the fact that LVMH and others are hiring consumer magazine editors to help them get the tone and detail of their online engagement right is both a reflection of the changing nature of media and commerce and also a recognition that the required skill sets are changing for retailers as their audience becomes more mobile, more open to new ideas and platforms, more able and willing to comparison shop,  and yes, more fickle. And it is these editorial skills with an inbuilt sharp eye on trends and fashion and what’s occupying the broad audience’s mind that allow brands to vary their “temporal packaging” and re-present their goods and services accordingly. Colin Firth won Best Actor last night? Fine, let’s write the timely and tonally on-brand sidebar. Let’s look at his suit, his cufflinks, his watch and show you what we have that will help you assemble this look.

For that’s what good content does—it presents a timely and compelling environment for engagement. That engagement may not always result in direct sales—but our analytics will tell us who came, who read, how long they spent on the content and what their actions were afterward. Our business objective now will be to figure out the whys and wherefores of maximizing that engagement through presentation, pricing, offers and the like.

Commerce—meet content!

Posted By: Craig Waller