Getting Started With Creative Commerce
Creative commerce is becoming a North Star as pressure builds for marketing campaigns to generate both brand engagement and sales. The new discipline calls us to apply fresh creative constructs to measurable commerce programs — effectively unifying the parallel paths of brand development and conversion — so consumers notice, talk about and buy our brands more.
For most brands, the urgent question is how to begin the complex reorientation involved. Expanding our perspective on commerce to include both persuasion and purchase clears the way to setting up a new approach. Here are the steps brands should take:
Re-educate marketing teams. We need a marketing, not promotion, mentality for creative commerce. The point is sustainable pull-through for the brand, not just periodic traffic and sales spikes. The blunt-force tactics of discounting and retargeting won’t deliver. Brand, agency and partner teams can reset by looking at how commerce takes shape on a longer and wider spectrum. Seeing the many ways consumers now become and stay loyal shoppers, and influence others, can realign everyone on how their individual efforts complement one another.
Restructure briefings. Business goals need to be articulated in briefs. Activations must include earlier and easier opportunities for consumers to shop once they’re engaged. This can include shoppable media and QR codes. Then they can accept new parameters and roles. For example, creative teams need to elicit both engagement and transaction online — including calls to action in brand ads — while retail specialists need to envision communications beyond displays in aisles.
Develop a paid, owned and earned strategy. A widening range of channels propel persuasion and purchase now. Whereas shopper marketing has leaned heavily into retail media, creative commerce can engage paid, owned and earned media. Consider all the pathways from TV to TikTok; how, when and where people intersect with our brand messages; and what exposures generate both pipeline and purchase.
Set new measurement frameworks. While shopper marketing can be measured on sales within promotion windows, creative commerce takes a more intricate, interdependent measurement system. To ensure that business gains can be clearly measured, evaluated and benchmarked over time, we need to create benchmarks for exposure, engagement, new and repeat business from specific consumer targets. It starts upstream with creative impact — how we’re gaining attention and engagement from targeted consumers and how that’s leading to cultural and social connections. Then factor in consumer sentiment and brand health to determine the value of media. Balance these with short- and long-term retail ROI calculations like sales lift, customer acquisition costs and customer lifetime value.
Play all for one. Creative commerce is a team sport. You can’t win with brand ideas or performance tactics alone. Beyond knowing what is happening across the field, the players need to build off each other’s efforts. There is both an ethos and a communications framework to establish.
How you start in creative commerce dictates how you finish. Laying the right foundation sets marketing up to make a more profound, lasting impact on the business. Mapping and then measuring every facet of ongoing campaigns — immediate impact, long-term value and the depth of consumer connections — enables continually higher sales and consumer loyalty.
About the Author
Dan Eisenberg is CMO at Blue Chip, a full-service agency specializing in creative commerce whose clients include Procter & Gamble, E. & J. Gallo Winery and White Castle. Dan has worked with more than 200 brand and retail marketers over the course of a 25-year career.