Retail Experience

The journey between branding and buying is no longer linear; commerce audiences can switch from brand awareness and consideration to buying in an instant. Today it is critical that brands have a clear, actionable and distinctive platform that can build their image in culture but also grow sales. We often work with businesses to identify or simply sharpen a brand’s value platform to ensure it is customer-first and at the heart of any customer experience. We understand that to be successful brand platforms need to flex across category, product, customer, e-commerce, social commerce and physical stores.

Understanding commerce audiences and where they interact with brands is at the heart of successful RX. We have built a number of research partnerships and proprietary RX tools to uncover breakthrough shopper insights. Firstly, we analyse the current market, category and brand context, then we audit existing digital and physical commerce ecosystems. Then we deep dive into the commerce audience, using tools like RX Hive to understand and build our RX commerce audience personas. We believe that understanding audiences is more important in retail than ever before - the buying moment is now where culture, emotion, brand and product intersect.

We recognise that for many of our clients overcoming commercial and channel driven silos to create a seamless customer-first journey can often be a challenge, given the complex channel structures and business stakeholders. This is made more complex by the need to be able to react quickly to short term trading opportunities or challenges that characterise the retail sector. Our RX framework approach is designed to help clients leverage the right creativity, at the right time, in the right place, for the right investment, reflecting a business’s annual customer activity plan. We look at creative commerce opportunities within the context of retailer and brand media ecosystems. We use modern CX techniques to map out the RX journey so that any creative development can land in the right channels and create impact that ultimately converts.

The buying experience for some brands - often due to a lack of focus or specialist strategy and creativity - is very different from the promise they communicate in culture. This is the disconnection between brand and buying. Our RX creative solutions aim to bridge that gap with breakthrough solutions anchored in one or a combination of: Physical retail and experience design Connected commerce (e, m and social), & digital innovation Channel success strategies & activations, including modern shopper & trade marketing. All of these solutions are delivered within an integrated brand ecosystem so that brand moments and buying moments remain connected and consistent.

Ideas are only as good as their delivery. We have the experts, services, products and processes to assist clients in overcoming stakeholder, operational and budgetary issues that can limit a great creative idea from being realised. Whatever the conversion challenge, we have the support and services required to deliver it. Pathway: An agile design delivery program for high volume, multi-market campaigns. Dynamic ecosystem toolkits: Integrated creative commerce toolkits for guidance & consistency across channels. Fixture design & implementation: Creative delivery solutions for physical retail. Experience delivery: Digital to physical experience solutions. Within VCCPs integrated ecosystem, we have the production skills and resources to bring to life a wide range of digital content and physical design assets.

Too many commerce designs and shopper campaigns don’t build in evaluation and measures of success. With modern brand ecosystems, benchmarking, content tracking and post-campaign evaluation is essential for continual improvement. We use a number of RX evaluation and measurement tools for low-fi testing and data measurement: Visual assessment tools: Testing assets & communication before launch. Content scoring: Testing & tracking the performance of different campaign campaigns. Ecosystem management: Continual assessment of metrics against benchmarks.