Helping online retailers through hard times

The Brief

As NZ Post continue to reinforce their position as the best partners for online shopping, we were asked to help develop their latest annual Market Sentiments Report. This report looks at shopper expectations and perceptions, using them to provide insights that help online retailers grow their business.

With tough economic conditions, the expectation was that there would be some big changes in shopper behaviours. The client was therefore very keen to add value to retailers with in-depth thinking about how to best respond to shoppers’ changing priorities and expectations.

The Solution

Market Sentiments is a large and complex project that generally starts in early February and hits the market in mid-May. It’s a project we are very proud of, working closely with the client end-to-end, from planning, to writing, designing, promoting and project-managing the many aspects involved in delivering a high-value and high-quality publication.

• We worked closely with the client’s research team to understand what we want to know from shoppers and retailers and to help establish the questions that gave us those answers and insights.
• The next step was to develop the strategic direction for the report, including the structure and overall design approach, ensuring a level of consistency with earlier reports, addressing past learnings and introducing new value-add content. This was refined and agreed with the client, becoming our guide for all further activity and decisions.
• Once the research findings came back, the focus was on developing the overall narrative for the report, including key findings and what they mean for retailers. The core story for this report centred on shoppers’ search for value, highlighting that value could mean price, quality or experience.
• With an overarching narrative agreed, we worked through writing each section of the report (over 12,000 words) to clearly communicate the research findings while always linking back to the agreed narrative. For each section the focus was on ‘so what’ to give audiences clear implications of the findings.
• The report also included three ‘in-depth’ sections providing a more detailed look at key areas, using additional specialist research. Working again with the research findings, we wrote thought-leadership pieces on sustainability, the value of a good delivery experience and on how, where and why Kiwis were shopping overseas.
• A further feature of the report is two case studies – Foxtrot Home and Not Socks – both SMEs who experienced success by delivering value to their customers. We developed the first case study as both a three-minute video and a 1000 word story. We then interviewed the second case study and wrote the in depth the case study from the discussion.
• The design of the report followed NZ Post’s brand guidelines while extending the look and feel of earlier reports. With the volume of information on offer, the focus was on accessible design that highlighted key information most valuable to readers.
• The next step was to include added-value insights and shopper observations. We wrote a series of helpful tips for retailers and embedded them into the document to align with relevant findings. We also developed five shopper profiles (as videos and short written profiles) that helped bring a more human element to a report largely led by data.
• The report was then applied to the specialist thought-leadership website, NZ Post BusinessIQ, which we manage for NZ Post. This involves careful curation of in-page and meta data to support search, SEO and marketing campaign success.

With the Market Sentiments report written and designed, the focus was on developing the marketing assets to help promote it. We wrote and designed a series of animated, illustrated and photography-led assets for social media, digital channels and for eDM.

The last big piece of the project was to turn the document into a series of high impact slides that NZ Post’s GM Business could use to launch the report’s findings and insights at a large retail sector conference.

The Results

Despite having a new team on the project at our end, and on the client side, this was a project that ran smoothly, delivering on all the goals we agreed with the client. Retailers have responded by downloading the report in their thousands (over 10,000 so far) driven by an active marketing campaign across multiple channels. The feedback on the report is that it delivers excellent data and insights which are valuable to retailers. Most importantly, it continues to reinforce that NZ Post is a great business partner who is committed to supporting retailers to grow their online business.