Case Study
How Tapestry helped BAM to drive digital transformation
Trading successfully for 14 years, selling supersoft and sustainable clothes for active people, BAM’s marketing strategy was centred on their catalogue. Aware that consumer habits are changing, BAM wanted to transform how they engaged with their customers by becoming less reliant on offline catalogue-led marketing.
BAM believed that, as well as delivering improvements on key business drivers around cost efficiencies and return on investment, this would enable BAM to become more flexible and dynamic in marketing planning and execution.
To realise this ambition, BAM appointed data insight and marketing strategy specialists The Tapestry Agency, tasking us with helping to evolve their business and develop a digitally-focused strategy.
Addressing the challenges to deliver new insights
BAM needed a deeper understanding of consumer buying decisions and the role each channel played in the path to purchase. This would give BAM new insights, helping them to make better, more informed decisions that would positively impact sales.
Before bringing Tapestry on board, BAM had adopted a traditional ‘waterfall’ approach to channel attribution. Based on intuition, they ranked each of their channels, with those perceived as the most measurable at the top. The result was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those ranked highest in the hierarchy – direct mail and email – would always be credited as the most effective sales drivers, while those at the bottom – the digital channels – would continue to be viewed as less effective and less important.
Unfortunately, this approach distorted the true impact of each channel, as it failed to show how channel effectiveness and value changed over time. Discounting the impact of emerging channels reinforced the status quo, preventing BAM from achieving a true multi-channel approach, and resulting in less effective decisions, impacting both marketing and business performance.
Tapestry focused on removing this distortion, introducing an unbiased approach that gauged the value of each of BAM’s channels to drive effective marketing.
We dismantled the channel hierarchy and adopted a matrix approach to analysing and comparing channel impact, identifying how customers interacted with the campaign as a whole and their contribution to the final sale.
This attribution-led approach immediately revealed new channel insights. Most notably, pay-per-click (PPC) was found to be driving 100% more sales than it had been credited for – proving that digital was much more important than BAM had originally assumed.
We also showed BAM how much value their retargeting activity, driven via online digital ads, was delivering. We independently verified the supplier results and helped BAM better understand incremental testing. This allowed them to quantify the value delivered by their spend with their online digital ad provider, giving them confidence to continue investing in this channel.
Delivering sales growth and business transformation
Working with Tapestry has transformed how BAM approaches marketing. From being a campaign-centric business, BAM has adopted a customer-centric approach, based on an understanding of customer behaviour decisions. By identifying what was influencing purchasing decisions and how customers preferred to buy, BAM can now feed this insight into developing more effective campaigns.
Today, BAM’s planning takes into account activities and engagements as a whole, not simply looking at them as individual events. As a result, they’ve adjusted their marketing investment, focusing the majority of their marketing on digital channels. The greater clarity afforded by Tapestry’s work has allowed BAM to make better, more informed and more impactful marketing decisions which in turn contributed to a 30% growth in sales for the business.
The shift to digital is delivering a younger, more urban audience, extending BAM’s customer base. Tapestry’s channel insights have also allowed BAM to identify how the channel mix impacts their product mix. While understanding each audience’s buying preferences is helping with decisions around product lines and stock requirements.
BAM is now developing a more considered discounting strategy, reducing reliance on blanket discounting and focusing on personalised offers and promotions. This improves margins and can drive customer loyalty.
Greater channel control has created a flexible and adaptable business that is more responsive to changing market dynamics. Tapestry’s in-depth reporting includes not just sales and response rate metrics but repeat orders levels, average order value, revenue-per-click and lifetime value, so BAM can really understand their marketing activity. Insights into how BAM’s spend allocation is impacting channel performance allow them to dial channels up or down, based on changing market conditions.
This has already paid dividends for the business.
“Our ability to alter our channel strategies quickly means we were better prepared as a business to respond to the impact of Coronavirus and the subsequent lockdown”
commented Ryan Shannon, Managing Director at BAM.
“Working with The Tapestry Agency to understand the value of each channel gave us the confidence to make rapid spending decisions, quickly changing how we allocated our marketing budget when consumer buying habits suddenly shifted. This will also be critical as we move into the autumn/winter season, with the business well-placed to react to changes in the economy and consumer behaviour whether these come in the form of challenges or opportunities.”
