MR PORTER

Lead Agency

HAVAS MEDIA INTERNATIONAL

MAKING THE WORLD A MORE STYLISH PLACE ONE MAN AT A TIME

The Challenge

MR PORTER is an award-winning global online retail destination for men’s style, combining the best international menswear with editorial content. Set up in 2011 as part of the Net-A PORTER group, the product offering has resonated with a growing audience, winning customers over from traditional Brick & Mortar retailers. However, the latter are fighting back through big omni-channel investments and along with rising online retailers, are claiming part
of the e-commerce pie. Our goal for 2015, was to defend our share and grow the business by attracting new customers and driving incremental traffic to the website. To deliver this, we had to win big in Q4 where a significant part of our sales takes place. But how could we draw the attention from the big sales events of Q4 and stand out from the competition whose budgets
dwarfed ours? We decided that the best way to achieve this was by talking about the two things that set us apart from everyone else: a) the unique range of beautiful products and b) our reputation of a luxurious customer service. With these two, we were confident we could fulfill our mission, to make the world a more stylish place, one man at a time!

The Strategy

“You Can Judge a Man by His Shoes”
Shifting focus to our unique product range meant that we had to move away from the umbrella “Very MR PORTER” brand campaign. More importantly, we had to make a tough choice of picking one product category to front the campaign. Naturally, we turned to our data sets which unveiled shoes as one of the most common entry points for new customers. Behavioral insights from the menswear category also pointed at shoes as one of the most common online buys for men, possibly driven by the confidence of knowing exactly the size they need. We launched eight exclusive footwear collections
across a variety of specialist shoemakers and leading designer brands and enhanced the landing page of the shoe section to feature easier-to-navigate shopping tools to boost sales conversions.

“The power of two”
We were confident that our shoe focus would deliver the numbers for the early run up to Christmas, however, we knew that as we were getting closer to the peak season we needed to remind consumers of our superior service experience in order to bypass the competition and shop from us. Once again, we turned to the data for insights that would help us validate the best
possible route. We knew that a significant part of our customers were female who were shopping for their partners. The data coupled with category insights hinted that this counter-intuitive segment should not be ignored as there was big potential growth. Female partners are often key influencers of our target mens wardrobes, are quite knowledgeable about their sizes and very often purchase gifts for them. Making MR PORTER a default female destination for male gifting would unlock great gains. But running a campaign targeting women would be stretching us thinly. This lateral thinking became the breeding ground that gave birth to the first ever joint campaign between MR PORTER & Net-A-PORTER. While Net-a-PORTER and MR PORTER have unique identities, one thing they have in common is a shared value of the customer. The campaign’s main focus was gifting with the “All for you” ad taking a whimsical look at the “magic” behind the brands’ customer service.

The Implementation

“The world’s best Shoes”
We kicked off the shoes campaign with Home Page takeovers in key sites like GQ & NY MAG to achieve impact and then followed our audience across different channels. As a business that is set up on the principle of high
quality content we aimed for engaging environments that would enrich the user experience rather than disrupt it. This resulted in native placements bought programmatically as well as editorial support from “GQ Selects” section
on the GQ site. To prompt more engagement we teamed up with Shortlist showcasing the exclusive collections along with a competition that gave winners £500 credit to spend at MR PORTER. We took advantage of our
audience being urban commuters who still enjoy a traditional print read on their daily commute. Using a polybag format we distributed the Special Issue of the MR PORTER journal with the Evening Standard tapping into that
browsing time. Finally we run a large number of engagement units on mobile, a key media for this audience, across premium environments capturing their attention.

“#AllForYou”
Our Christmas joint activity with Net-A-Porter was a fronted by a beautiful video piece that took the viewer on an insiders’ journey of a package, re-imagined through a magical lens. The film ultimately showcased the ultimate
luxury services provided by both brands using the #AllForYou strapline. We used dominant placements bought programmatically on Private Marketplaces with expandable video units to make the most of the cinematic feel and
incorporated dual CTA (shop his/hers) to maximize engagement. We beefed this up by seeding the video on youtube and selected publishers with Teads across 8 markets, cinema in the US and topped that with paid social
activity onFacebook and Instagram. We knew from historical performance data that activities during commuting times were highly effective for impact and Top of Mind awareness. To make the most of it we targeted digital
OOH in affluent areas of London during commute hours, we organized a pop-up store for one day in the West Village, NY. In addition we also utilized print titles such as Evening Standard, LA Times and NY Times. As we
were getting got closer to Christmas the focus shifted to sales swapping our creative to a count-down ticker unit on key sites.

The Result

Overall the campaign smashed our “new customers” target contributing 20% new customers out of all customers during the campaign period. This was 100% higher from our initial 10% target.

The Shoes campaign had the highest contribution to new customers by 25% whilst the engagement went through the roof with our competition hitting 7,000 entries, 3 times higher than the expected target (2,000)

Our co-branded video did amazingly well contributing 28% of all campaign sales and delivering an unprecedented £10 ROI.

Finally one of the most significant aspects in the execution of this campaign was to get closer to our ongoing goal of delivering advertising only to real people using the most accurate targeting. For this we used both DCM (Double Campaign Manager) and ATLAS (Facebook’s ad server). On the back of this
we managed to conduct meticulous gender and age analysis proving that our holiday activity increased female activity on the site by doubling the weekly average by 137%.