- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 0
- 0
-
Sparkle (0)
As originally written for Brick Meets Click, a community of retail experts that shares ideas and insights about the future of shopping.
Here’s one for the case studies’ repertoire.
The Setting:
Missoni, the legendary Italian design house created a 400 piece downmarket collection for mass retailer Target.
Target is no stranger to designer cool, having featured many designer collaborations in the past (Michael Graves, Isaac Mizrahi, Liberty of London, Jean-Paul Gauthier, Alexander McQueen…). The Target brand’s established sense of design has allowed it to cross the barriers of social acceptability, where shopping at Target is cool, no matter your social or financial status.
As you have most likely heard, the Missoni for Target collection launched bright and early on September 14 and was due to run until October 22. This collection, of course, had immediate appeal to fashionistas and stylistas everywhere who blogged and tweeted galore about it all. The advertising and social media machines were also at work to create demand. And lots of it.
Indeed, shoppers formed long lines outside Target stores hours before the 8:00am opening time, hoping to get first dibs on the “Missoni” goods. In what appeared to be a feeding frenzy, most stores were cleaned out of Missoni for Target merchandise within a matter of hours and some within minutes of opening. We’ve heard stories of customers’ aggressive behavior as they fought each other for merchandise and of the police being called in to restore the peace.
Unfortunately, online shoppers fared not much better as the Target website crashed repeatedly throughout the day, frustrating hundreds of customers unable to complete their orders. Adding insult to injury, those few who did manage to place their orders in between online blackouts received emails stated that their orders were canceled or delivery of product postponed.
Within hours, secondary markets surfaced on Ebay and Craigslist, pricing items at two or three times the regular retail price (38,000 plus Missoni for Target items were recorded at one point).
The Questions:
I’m not sure that any them can be fully answered today, but it’s certainly fodder for speculation as to whether Target would deem this campaign to be a success or a fiasco.
Was the scarcity of product intentional?
It would seem hard believe that this was the strategy: creating rabid demand and then leave the fans disappointed and unsatisfied. Have there been many recorded instances of this being a successful tactic in the long term? Of course, scarcity is always a good driver for demand, but it appears that the campaign was not presented to purposely resemble that of a U2 live concert ticket sale where scalpers and the privileged few get the tickets.
To the observer, it seems rather like a missed opportunity to sell more product and to – reasonably - satisfy demand. The collection was to be available until October 22. How could Target have so badly misjudged that date? By setting the date, the company set expectations. Are they incapable of fulfilling expectations or simply have not intention of doing so?
There have been speculations on both sides of this “scarcity” argument. But the perception is, as @frumpfactor put it on Twitter: “Artificially manufactured scarcity just isn't my thing. Yes, I'm talking to you, #missonifortarget.”
Where was Target’s Social Media team?
We would assume that Target’s social media team would have been all ears and have measured the social buzz, especially since many campaigns (bloggers, etc) were launched specifically to create… buzz. Were they not listening? Enough sophisticated social media monitoring tools exist now that a reasonable measure of impact and expected demand could have been assumed.
Was this frenzy beneficial or hurtful to the Target and Missoni brands?
In Target’s case, the short-term is not looking pretty. Many shoppers are completely disgruntled with how Target managed (rather, did NOT manage) customer support for the Missoni for Target campaign. New Twitter handles such as the @BoycottTarget and hashtags such as #TargetFail reveal the extent of disgruntlement among previous fans of the brand. We also need to ask ourselves why Target was still running their Missoni ads on television days after the stores had clearly been wiped out of the merchandise.
Certainly, this brought additional attention to the Target brand and perhaps brought in new shoppers. Realistically, whether in-store or online, their experience could NOT have been a positive one. That answers that.
For Missoni, as a purveyor of luxury design, it is understood that their downmarket Target collection was a lovely
