SF Pink

Men’s clothing brand Pink burst onto the scene in the 1980s and has now reclaimed its original reputation for individualised style, with a rebrand powered by customised service both in stores and online

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9 september 2019

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How an 80s icon is reinventing itself through personalisation

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Shirtmaker Thomas Pink was one of the 1980s’ most recognisable menswear brands. Founded by three brothers in 1984, its colourful shirts became synonymous with the swagger and style of the London financial industry’s young ‘City boys’. By the 1990s it was dressing top politicians and A-list actors and in 1997 was bought by luxury house LVMH – owner of Louis Vuitton, Moët & Chandon and Hennessy, among other brands. But more recently, by the admission of Christina Estebaek, its director of ecommerce and omnichannel, the brand had “drifted too far away from its core values”. The outcome was a full-scale brand relaunch. In November 2018, the brand announced it was changing its branding from Thomas Pink to Pink Shirtmaker London – just Pink in most contexts, which matches the original branding from 1984. That has been accompanied by a move upmarket and a focus on personalisation, of both the product and the customer experience. And at the start of September, Pink also launched a new ad campaign utilising its refreshed image, fronted by The Crown actor Matthew Goode (pictured below). According to brand and image director Loic Le Bihan: “It always comes back to the same thing, which is confidence and individuality. It is all about making sure we serve the client the best we can.” Some of that individuality had been missing from the business recently, neither being a bespoke tailor nor offering a particularly personalised ecommerce experience. Instead it had fallen into the mid-market of fashion retail. Now Pink wants to offer a more individual experience both offline and online. This is a key demand of modern consumers, 84% of whom say being treated like a person rather than a number is very important to winning their business, according to Salesforce’s most recent ‘State of Marketing’ report. As president and CEO Christopher Zanardi-Landi told Marketing Week at Salesforce World Tour earlier this year: “One of the most important things that is happening in our world right now, of course, is everything around customisation, and a client wanting something that fits them exactly, so we have brought in two aspects. One, in our workshop in Vauxhall, we are offering a fully bespoke service in a way that actually hasn’t been [available] in the UK for quite a long time, [but doing] it in a way that is much more accessible.”

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By: Morag Cuddeford-Jones

Source: SALESFORCE

The second aspect is: “From a technology point of view, [there is an opportunity] to take a customer through that journey - not just from what used to be taking an order and then a long dull silence until hopefully your shirts show up, [but] to continue to engage and activate, and even come and watch your shirts being made.” According to Zanardi-Landi, Pink finds the fusion of online and offline channels works particularly well in delivering the personalised experience it is aiming for. Supported by technology such as Salesforce, it is attempting to replicate the feeling of bespoke tailoring in its online communications, and the two have to go hand-in-hand because so much of the brand’s business comes through loyal customers reordering. Pink store staff are empowered to nurture ongoing relationships with customers using technology – for example, dictating notes about a customer’s visit, their shirt size and their preferred fit into a mobile device, which then updates their online profile using voice-driven AI. This profile information will then, in turn, be able to automate the customer’s size and fit choices next time they shop online, making the process quicker and easier. As Estebaek says: “Technology needs to be seamless. It needs to make itself forgotten. If you've given information, you don't want to repeat yourself, you actually want someone to just know you.” But there’s a flip-side to this, she adds: “Technology is amazing because it allows us to experiment and it allows us to do some really innovative stuff, and also have fun. We have a history of being a traditional shirt maker but we're a traditional shirt maker with a very modern twist.” The technology-led approach to injecting greater personalisation into the customer experience has been a central part of Pink’s rebrand. It allows the business to go back to its roots while reimagining the service it offers in a modern context. ■

2017

2018

2019

Median number of data sources used by financial services marketing organisations

Read the report here

use of ai among financial service marketers

Currently use AI

49%

Plan to use AI within the next two years

+141%

Projected growth rate of AI use over the next two years

35%

Source: SALESFORCE

He argues: “It enables you to really focus on and develop these muscles. We can have a whole team that’s devoted to predictive analytics, and improving that and getting better at it, and then understanding how it can be used more broadly in the business.” Another key priority is to ensure data projects have valuable outcomes beyond just insights, he says: “Rather than doing analytics for the sake of analytics and maybe having a nice PowerPoint at the end of it, the whole idea is when you’re doing your project, is there an asset you can leave behind that can be repurposed or reused?” For example, Barclays has used its analytics capabilities to create segmentations based on where customers’ spending behaviour clusters around particular brands. This has created new insights on brand behaviour that Barclays can offer to corporate clients. Hardy explains: “We looked at our customers’ transactional behaviour and we looked at the brands that they spend on, and then we looked at the interaction between those brands – so if someone spends at brand X they are also likely to spend at brand Y. Then we performed some clustering around those brands and found which travelled together, and are better explained together than apart.”

Barclays also used anonymised card transaction data to find ways to serve its most valuable customers better in branches. The analysis showed affluent customers were more likely to be in the area around a branch later in the day, which led to the bank extending opening hours to allow them to come into the premises. A third application of analytics was to examine the catchment areas for particular stores using similar transaction data, for the benefit of clients in the retail and restaurant sectors. This has enabled those clients to work out how far consumers are willing to travel to visit a store, so they can see which existing stores have overlapping catchments and where they might be able to access a new market by opening a new store. This type of innovation around data has not been common for big, established financial services companies. Indeed, for many, the need to protect legacy business models has actively held it back. But as Aviva’s UK retail and brand director Tom Daniell told Marketing Week recently, “if customers believe we are innovating on their behalf, that’s a real driver of trust”.

The brand’s new AvivaPlus subscription product has been designed to reward loyal customers with the best price, rather than giving new customers the best deals and implicitly penalising those already with the brand. It has required a new product development model and was only possible because the company switched towards more agile working, where teams responsible for communications, data, media, proposition, product, customer experience, pricing and risk all sit together. According to Daniell: “This isn’t about putting a veneer over an existing product. This is grassroots up, absolutely a new product that fundamentally behaves economically for us in a different way but also behaves in a different way for customers.” It also means there is consistency in the customer journey, from marketing messages through to purchase and call centre service. Customer satisfaction and net promoter scores are already higher than for Aviva’s standard insurance product, following a soft launch. This is the kind of service consumers now expect – even from monolithic financial services organisations. The whole sector now needs to move just as fast as new digital entrants in order to keep up. ■

Read the report here

Read the 'State of Marketing' report here