Planning Casebook: Matalan keeps women firmly in its sights

by Angie Browne, Media Week 24-Jun-08

Challenge: We produced a two-pronged media campaign for the 2007 autumn/winter period, targeting two distinct audiences - Matalan's core housewives with children market, as well as a fashion-conscious ABC1 audience.

Client: Matalan
Agency: Feather Brooksbank
Planner: Angie Browne

Strategy
We devised a strategy that would initially target Matalan's core house-wife audience, before branching out to a wider market. This provided a transition from customer retention advertising to broader deal-led tactical offers. We chose to use outdoor as a bridging medium between campaigns, giving the brand a spike in awareness before we started with Christmas deals-led advertising.

Activity

Between September and October, press advertising targeting housewives appeared in women's weeklies and key female newspaper supplements. Outdoor media was used in the transition period between campaign messages, which shifted from targeting a broad audience with brand and fashion-led work, to more focused offer-led advertising in the build-up to Christmas.

We began our first wave of "deal" activity in the same press as the previous branding/customer retention activity to sustain impact and awareness. Strong visuals were produced by the creative agency to ensure that the deal ads were suited to the magazine environments.

Three-for-two deals were also communicated through a strong national radio campaign, using local stations to cover each individual store and national up-weights.

The campaign concluded with national and local press advertising promoting the final deal period to hit as many people as possible and to broaden the campaign's reach.

Results
The autumn/winter campaign generated a significant year-on-year sales uplift over its duration - 1.6% between September and October and 4.7% between November and December. Outdoor research from Clear Channel also showed that purchase consideration for Matalan rose as a result of the campaign, from 73% (the clothing norm) to 79%. Brand awareness also rose (60% to 64%), as did prompted awareness (53% to 64%). - Angie Browne, Account director, Feather Brooksbank.

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