How much do you know about retailer Hugo Boss? Probably not as much as you think, but as lead e-commerce product manager Aaron Baid pointed out at Contentsquare's recent Beat the Benchmark event:
In fact, we have Hugo and Boss. We're not just Hugo Boss. Actually he has two different meanings. Many of our testers said they were only familiar with the main menswear brand, Hugo Boss. In the majority, he said 90% of people didn't even know that different Hugo Boss brands existed in the first place. They're shopping and coming to our e-commerce store, but they still don't fully understand what the differences are between our brands, or that there's even a difference between brands in the first place. not.
So what's the difference? According to the company's own definition,
What is a boss? Featuring classic styling cues and craftsmanship insights, it emphasizes sophistication and professionalism. – Leverage traditional channels such as premium magazines and corporate partnerships.
What is Hugo? We focus on street style inspiration and trend predictions, showcasing edgy visuals and urban influences. – Leverage digital platforms and influencer collaboration for a more dynamic approach.
At the beginning of 2023, Baid and his team were given the goal of strengthening the brand as part of the retailer's Claim 5 growth strategy. It aims to double its turnover to his €4 billion by 2025, and aims to strengthen its brand, make product king, lead digital, rebalance omnichannel, and increase sales to €4 billion for growth. Based on his five pillars of organizing 2. Mr. Baid said:
For us, strengthening the brand, especially from an e-commerce perspective, is about understanding more about Hugo, telling our customers a little more about Hugo, and telling a little more of the story behind the brand itself.
customer knowledge
He explained that the team conducted in-store foot traffic studies for three months and came up with some interesting conclusions.
When we looked at the data and looked at the retail and e-commerce divide in the first place, we found that many of the retail customers who shop at Hugo don't just understand the brand; I understand very well. , But I also used to shop at the Hugo store a lot. The kind of division and market share that we had on the e-commerce side was really tilted toward Boss and didn't really penetrate Hugo as well as it should have.
He added that the look and feel of Hugo stores looks appealing to customers.
I felt like the look of the store, the red color, the different aesthetics, the marketing, the visual merchandising, everything was drawing people into the store. People started coming into stores because they felt a real connection to the brand. That wasn't what happened on the website.
What was needed was what Baid calls a “two-brand strategy,” and that effort started at the checkout point on the website.
Start with the conversion funnel at the end and work your way back and reverse engineer the way you're working within that funnel to understand a little bit more about why your customers are abandoning those other pages and why they're leaving that page. I will. Reasons for not checking out, reasons for leaving the PDP (product detail page), etc. This will help you learn more about your brand and your customers in the first place.
mobile only
One thing we decided on early on was that our strategy would be “mobile only.” It's not mobile-first, it's mobile-only.
In fact, we found that 70% of our customers come from mobile devices, and 30% of those come from desktops. Year-on-year from 2022, 67.1% of customers will come from mobile, and from 2023, 69.7% will come from mobile, and we're confident that next year we'll probably be at or near 75%. Masu. Now, in 2024, they walk around with personal laptops in their pockets. All their shopping can now be done on their mobile phones.
But let's take a step back and look a little more closely at where mobile traffic comes from. Currently, all of our traffic comes from social channels and also from paid search. That means 78% of new customers came from paid search and social channels. And that meant that the storytelling we were putting out through our social channels might not match what was on our website.
He gave the example of influencer Tizo Touchdown looking cool on Instagram by wearing a hoodie and having nails in his hair. However, when the customer clicked on it, they were taken to a web page featuring a man in a formal suit. Social and onsite experiences didn't match.
test
Beid said it took a lot of testing to effectively promote the brand.
Testing and experimentation are our team's top priorities and truly the most important thing. Every day we look at numbers, numbers, numbers, tons of quantitative data being thrown at us every day. It has everything from AOV (average order value), return rate, conversion rate, and more. Sometimes the story isn't told the way we want it to be told. To understand a little more about this number, you need to find a way around and navigate around these numbers.
And he argued that qualitative data is quality data.
Qualitative data is extremely important when it comes to e-commerce. So when we wanted to know a little more about what our customers felt and how they actually felt when they visited our website, we decided to work with a third party to do some usability testing and find out a little bit about how our customers felt. I made it. They recognized our brand.
We segmented different demographics. We asked people to look at our current website and conducted a survey about how they felt about the Hugo Boss brand, what they knew about the Hugo Boss brand, and what they would like to tell their friends and family about Hugo Boss. . The brand is Hugo Boss.
When talking about AB testing, Baid's team adapted the concept of winning and losing to become winning and learning. He said:
All in all, you can never go wrong when AB testing comes into play and when it comes to learning something about your customers. You can't actually lose. Just create new variations and learn more from the ones you've already created in the beginning. Therefore, we decided that winning and learning is how we move forward.
An example of a success was the introduction of brand switching functionality to help with customer engagement. On the learning front, Hugo Boss' attempts to promote its womenswear side didn't go as planned.
Customers had to go to the men's section to look for pants instead of automatically going to the men's world every time, which made a lot of people jump. It was causing a lot of frustration to our customers. So this was something that had to be switched. This needs to change and we are currently maintaining this male-only navigation.
Another aspect of the two brand strategies involves leveraging internal resources. His 90% of customers may not understand the difference between the brands, but he has an office outside Stuttgart where his 3,000 employees do. Baid explained:
Everyone in the office is drilled into us on a daily basis what Hugo is and what the boss is. So who better to test than those people in the first place?
Every Wednesday, Baid and one of his team have video calls with these people to leverage their input.
We spent an hour recording our screens and collecting relevant feedback from different departments about what they did and didn't want to see as part of Hugo Boss' two brand websites . And that's when we got some really great feedback, especially from the Hugo branding people who were really into the usability lab.
Many wanted an integration that would display more marketing content directly on product listing pages. To break down this kind of clothes, clothes, clothes, clothes, clothes, put a guy with nails coming out of his hair in the middle of the listing page. This is a good idea. The entire page will look better. I think it adds to the story a little bit.
