Activating Style Through Fashion Partnership 06/09

Sales Rocket from Unprecedented Pairing

Challenge
With the economic downturn leading to double digit drops in retail sales, H&M needed results. While the retailer was known for offering young, stylish consumers great value on must-have fashion, consumers often didn’t buy additional items beyond advertised merchandise. The goal was to convince the H&M in-store shopper to buy more than the advertised ‘must have’ items that drive consumers to the store.

MediaCom’s Strategy 
We quickly realized we weren’t facing an ad awareness issue, but rather an in-store, shopper-marketing conversion issue. To focus on shopper interception, we had to come up with a revolutionary in-store solution that was both effective and executable, without making additional demands on in-store staff. By leveraging MediaCom’s deep relationship with fashion icon ELLE, we worked together to develop a first-ever endorsement program with four components:

• ELLE picked featured H&M merchandise
• Stylists endorsed the picks
• H&M reconfigured the store
• Consultants styled consumers with ELLE’s picks

What makes this truly unique? Fashion brands with the cachet and credibility of ELLE do not typically lend their name, while, for the first time ever, H&M allowed an outside company to co-brand its store and merchandise.

Results
MediaCom literally changed shopper behavior. In a category suffering double-digit sales decreases, H&M sales showed double-digit sales increases in stores utilizing the ELLE Endorsement Program, an extraordinary conversion from shopping to purchase.

MediaCom won MediaWeek's Media Plan of the Year Award for this campaign in the category "Best Plan Less than $1 Million/Print Focus."