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David Jones undergoes ‘complete rethink’ to align marketing with brand purpose

Screen Shot 2015-06-09 at 1.34.11 PMDavid Jones has undergone a “complete rethink of its brand purpose” as the department store flagged a shake-up of its Leading an extraordinary Life tagline that has led its marketing since the start of last year.

Victoria Doidge, general manager marketing communications, said the company has done a “stack of research” in a move to understand its brand and heritage.

Speaking at the Mumbrella360 conference last week, Doidge said DJs recognised that its extraordinary life campaigns were out of step with its purpose.

“Lead an extraordinary life is a terrific campaign but I am not sure it was anchored back to purpose in the way that great brands need to be,” she said. “So our future direction is to have purpose, values and mission really aligned to what will be our future campaigns.”

She said it has worked with research agency Pollinate to reassess its purpose.

“We are not extraordinary in every channel and in every campaign and it’s true to say we have been through another complete re-think on what our brand purpose is,” Doidge said, adding that 50 David Jones staff sat in rooms talking with consumers about the brand.

“We have redefined our purpose,” she added.

Doidge declined to reveal further details other than to tell delegates to “watch this space”.

Earlier in a panel discussion, Doidge predicted brands will increasingly focus on video marketing, citing five-year-old research from Cisco which suggested 90 per cent of internet traffic would be video content by 2014.

“That hasn’t happened yet but there will be a time where video is the only way we communicate as brands so it’s going to change what we do enormously,” she said.

The next focus for David Jones will be producing “hub” content with “episodic content where we tell brand narrative stories”, she said,

TV-series style content has been discussed, she said.

Doidge said social will remain a growing element of its marketing and flagged how the brand has a “social hungry workforce” who could be used to bolster its content.

“The next frontier is social employee engagement, so how can we find 100 bloggers across the company and empower them to go hard,” she said.

“With our corporate handles, there is a limited amount you can do so what we want to do is empower the people to be our voice.”

Despite the social focus, Doidge admitted traditional forms of social media have not driven much online commerce. She described that as “challenging”.

“The business will always look at ROI and say it’s not actually driving sales. You have to build economic models which tell the story of how you are driving traffic in store and moving people along the purchase funnel,” she told the discussion.

“We are seeing exponential growth from traffic from social but you need to measure it in a lot of different ways. It’s important not to measure just on traffic.”

Steve Jones

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