Retail News: Littlewoods in 'home' blitz

by Rachel Barnes, Marketing 15-Sep-04

Littlewoods is boosting its investment in marketing to re-establish the pre-eminence of its home-shopping brand.

The group, whose businesses include the Littlewoods Even More catalogue, direct-to-consumer brand LX Direct, Littlewoods Finance and online shop Sport-e.com, revealed that it had a 'multimillion-pound promotional budget ready to go'. It also plans to strengthen its marketing team.

Sarah Cheetham, marketing director for Littlewoods Even More, will oversee the implementation of the group's first loyalty and sales incentive scheme, which will be devised over the coming months. A head of customer retention will be hired to design and run the programme, which will drive demand from existing and lapsed customers.

The group is also creating a data insight role to improve the efficiency of its promotional spend. The head of LX insights and targeting will be charged with delivering multimedia campaigns for LX Direct. These will use text messages for the first time, as well as traditional channels such as statements, parcel inserts, emails, brochures and telemarketing.

The role will also be responsible for improving customer segmentation so the group can target different shopper profiles with specific campaigns.

Littlewoods, whose promotional spend is estimated at £15m, is second in the home-shopping sector to sister firm Shop Direct, owner of the Kays and Great Universal brands. It also competes with Argos, which makes 25% of its sales through home shopping.

Shop Direct was bought by the Barclay brothers, owner of Littlewoods, for £590m last year from Great Universal Stores.

In July Littlewoods chief executive Mark Newton-Jones unveiled an overhaul of its stores to target the over-40 women's market. He pledged to increase its emphasis on quality (Marketing, 21 July).