Forrester’s Digital Go to Market Review: Apparel and Shoe Brands

The footwear and apparel sectors are the latest updates to our Digital Go-To-Market Review series. This series has previously covered beauty, home goods, and consumer packaged goods (CPG). This category is quite mature for brands that sell direct to consumers. We found some interesting features such as:

• Levi’s Secondhand Website.
• Patagonia’s Activism Page.
• Nike’s Member page.
• Ray-Ban’s Guide to Face Shape (with Virtual Try-On).

Although these features can be distinguishing, it is important to understand the basics. The top 4 attributes that UK and US online shoppers look at when shopping for clothing or footwear products are price, quality, availability, as well as product features.

Consumers may choose to buy products through other channels, such as online marketplaces, if the website doesn’t provide enough information about quality and product features, does not offer pricing information, is out-of-stock, or leads on price. Brands can have an arm’s length relationship with customers who buy products from online marketplaces rather than a brand website. You also have less control over the placement of your products and may be closer to gray-market sellers who sell brand goods.

What can a brand manufacturer do? Take control.

Forrester’s Digital Go-To-Market Review series helps them achieve that goal. It evaluates brands within a particular category to determine how well they can thrive on their own. We evaluated 27 footwear and apparel brands on five aspects. We reviewed each brand’s:

• Strength from direct-to-consumer.
• Online visibility for brands
• Distribution and eControl
• Organic consumer enthusiasm.
• Innovation in product design.

We rated seven brands best-in-class from this review: Adidas, Columbia Sportswear (Levi’s), Nike, Patagonia and Nike. To find out more about these brands and best practices in this sector, please refer to the recently published summary report ” Digital Go-To-Market Review – Apparel and Shoe Brands, Q22021.”

For more information about the brand manufacturer research and digital go-to-market review, and to discuss what your company should do according to these findings, please contact Madeline Cyr at [email protected] or me at [email protected] To discuss our findings with clients, please contact me.

Google Delays the Cookiepocalypse – A Data Deprecation update

Yesterday, Google published a revised timeline for its Privacy Sandbox milestones. In its blog post, it highlighted two important announcements that marketers should pay attention to:

1. Google claims it is working to improve the process for testing and deploying Privacy Sandbox proposals in a variety of use cases like fraud detection, targeting, ad measurement, and targeting. These will be deployed by the end of 2022 to help increase adoption and then to begin to remove third-party cookies. This plan will see the elimination of 3P cookies over a three month period in 2023.
2. Google has concluded the current trial for Federated Learning of Cohorts. It received feedback about the FLoC implementation and plans to include it in future testing. The FLoC test has had its challenges. It was used by advertising technology vendors to create persistent profiles, but it is not available for use by marketers in regulated sectors.

Google indicated that the changes would allow for “…public debate on the right solutions, continued engagements with regulators, as well as for publishers and the industry to migrate its services.”

Marketers should not take this announcement to mean that they are slowing down on their plans for the future without third party cookies. Google continues to develop its plans and this won’t be the company’s last.

Don’t let this detract from the bigger context: We are moving away from collecting and using opaque consumer data and towards a choice-driven, transparent and privacy-friendly future. Marketers need to:

• Future-proof your current targeting, digital media purchasing, and measurement strategies.Continue testing contextual advertising, first party-based targeting and cleanly sourced second parties audience segments with Forrester’s “Audience Targeting: The Future“Research as your guide.
• Talk to your technology and service partners about how you are preparing for a data-deprecated tomorrow.Why?Do they think their approach(s) is sustainable? What steps can they recommend?YouTake control of your lifeData deprecation journeyWhat is the best way to get started?
• Continue to invest in your zero-party and first-party data assets.You should identify the points in your customer journey that you can collect preferences, context, context, or intentions. Ensure that you maximize the opportunities to use this data.With an eye towards delivering a valuable customer experience