As part of The Drum’s Fashion & Beauty Focus, Zalando’s head of marketing and content will set up the retailer’s stall for the next five years and beyond.
Zalando wants to establish itself as Europe’s largest fashion and lifestyle retailer. To achieve this, the company is focusing on fresh positioning and a bold new campaign featuring actor Willem Dafoe.
The Drum spoke to Anne Pascual, Zalando’s Senior Vice President of Design, Marketing and Content, at a pivotal moment in Zalando’s 16-year history. In March, Zalando underwent a major business strategy update that resulted in a repositioning of the brand, a redesign of its assets and packaging, improvements to the customer experience, and a commitment to a big-budget brand campaign. It has become.
“This is a big moment for Zalando,” declared Pascual, breathing a sigh of relief that the team’s hard work could finally see the light of day.
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quality, lifestyle and entertainment
There are three key pillars to strategic renewal. The first is quality. Pascual explains that Zalando wants to “differentiate ourselves through the quality of our brand selection and customer experience.” This updates the app and improves the brand inventory list.
The second is marketing Zalando as a lifestyle retailer rather than purely for fashion. The company has already begun to do this with its beauty, sports, and electronics offerings. Pascual added: “We want to continue to really connect different parts of our customers’ lives, their passions and interests across these different lifestyle areas.”
The final “pillar” is entertainment and inspiration. Pascual explains: “In recent years, consumers have completely changed their shopping behavior, looking for inspiration and discovering new products and brands.” Zalando says that to increase the frequency of visits to sites and apps, Capitalize on this shift in consumer behavior by creating fun content such as videos and articles. “Zalando wants to go beyond a purely transactional role,” she added.
what shall i wear?
Once the business strategy was defined, Pascual’s team worked to reposition Zalando’s brand purpose. The goal was to help customers feel more confident. While the previous purpose was all about self-expression, Pascual says, “Self-expression is a means to an end, and that end is rather to feel good about yourself.”
We redefined the brand’s purpose to instill confidence in our customers and revamped our brand assets with a brighter orange color and bolder logo. Pascual says it’s a more confident brand identity.
Business and brand updates neatly packaged for consumers through Zalando’s “What Do I Wear?” The campaign started last month. Pascual said of the lyrics “What Do I Wear?”: “This song captures a universal truth that we all have about this one question when getting dressed in the morning, because it forces us to think strategically as well as practically. Because I can do it. “OK,” how do you want to approach today and how do you feel?”
The first ad to be released with the title “What Do I Wear?” The platform was developed by creative agency Wieden+Kennedy and stars include actor Willem Dafoe and Danish model Brigitte Nielsen. The 30-second hero ad features a subway train full of uniquely dressed people, each with a question in mind: “What are you wearing…”
“Previous campaigns for Zalando have been more of a fashion brand, but now we want to tell a story that shows we are a retailer, so we want to dig a little deeper. This gives us more room to publish individual stories.”
Creatively, the team worked hard on styling the costumes to make them feel “relatable, exciting, and fun.” Also, a subway train was used as the setting to show different characters, ages, and personalities. “The subway is not overly ambitious or superficial, it reflects society as it is,” she adds. According to Pascual, the final key part of the campaign was to feature Zalando’s app and its packaging, which was a first for the brand. “There’s a completely different energy. The way Zalando comes out is bolder, more fun, and more confident.”
The campaign will continue to roll out over the next few months, followed by holiday and spring/summer ads created using the same platform. In addition to paid channels, Zalando has enabled advertising through its content department, which includes articles and videos about each character, and all costumes are available for purchase.
@zalando Actor and style icon Willem Dafoe spills the tea on what his equally iconic character wears #Fall #WhatDoIWear #ZalandoAW24 #WillemDafoe ♬ Original song – Zalando
Zalando’s content ambitions
In 2022, Zalando acquired a majority stake in Highsnobiety with the idea of combining the media company’s cultural relevance, storytelling and fashion authority with Zalando’s e-commerce capabilities. “Zalando was impressed and excited by Highsnobity’s storytelling ability, in addition to everything we wanted to offer more of, including curation and cultural relevance,” Pascual said of the deal. I’ll tell you.
In September 2023, the partnership culminated in the launch of Stories on Zalando, a content hub that feeds through to retailer websites and apps. Weekly segments include Cover Story, Style Bible, Guest Edit, The Perfect X, and Unpacked. “Stories on Zalando is the first example of our ambition to go beyond simply offering transactional convenience to our customers.”
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A recent update to the platform is talent profile pages, or what Pascual calls “tastemaker” profiles. These are people who share content and products and share them with their followers, but who are not social media influencers in the traditional sense, but who have cultural credibility within the realm of Zalando. They are photographers, chefs, and makeup artists.
She defines Stories on Zalando’s readers as “cultural consumers,” people for whom fashion is more than clothes, and who consider themselves “fashion enthusiasts.” Pascual makes it clear that this strategy is not about finding a new target audience. “It makes it clear who we are focused on and why we are the right product and the right destination for enthusiasts.”
For the past three years, Pascual has been working to bring together design, marketing, and content teams to build one Zalando brand. result? “It is a holistic Zalando brand with many different touchpoints, but a red thread emerges in how we appear and how we are perceived.”
