High Street chain works with EMC and partners to build New Look Daily and drive multichannel brand awareness

High Street chain works with EMC and partners to build New Look Daily and drive multichannel brand awareness

New Look has announced the deployment of New Look Daily, a customer hub developed with EMC’s Consulting division.

New Look Daily is a central part of the fashion retailer’s information strategy, and takes the form of a cloud-based online environment designed to drive brand awareness by bringing together New Look’s customers from multiple social media platforms.

In particular, New Look wanted to build on the success of its Facebook page, which had seen a 700% growth in ‘likes’ in just 12 months. New Look wanted to engage equally with those of its customers who are not on Facebook, strengthening its online presence and complementing its existing e-commerce offering.

Uniting existing customer communities

Capitalising on the opportunity to change the way New Look drives customer engagement through insight and analytics, EMC Consulting was tasked with creating this multichannel customer experience. It needed to create a platform that could unite existing online customer communities, rich content and e-commerce while offering users a fun and easy way to engage with the retailer. New Look Daily is driven by user-generated content, giving customers with an appetite for fashion the opportunity to have their contributions showcased as editorial on the site.

EMC Consulting worked alongside New Look to create a ‘Value Map,’ a tool that pinpointed the key benefits New Look Daily would be able to deliver, as well as the measures that will be needed to demonstrate success. New Look’s value map was created through the completion of competitor audits, trends analysis, monitoring analysis, and network mapping. This enabled the consultancy to create a site that would drive brand advocacy and provide a competitive advantage for New Look based on deeper customer insight and understanding.

Despite complex requirements, the hub took 12 weeks to create, integrate and populate. Hitting the deadline was made possible by using cloud computing as a platform to accelerate the development cycle for test, development and delivery. EMC Consulting partnered with Acquia to build the site using Drupal open source technology, making New Look Daily quick, agile and flexible to update and manage. Critical to the success of the project was transforming New Look’s business processes to support new customer requirements made possible through the site. A partnership with Schway, an online ‘outfit builder’ that enables customers to create, share and purchase entire outfits from New Look’s product catalogue, gave the business the agility to make New Look Daily a reality.

Creating cutting-edge digital experience

Amy Thom, head of brand marketing at New Look, said: “EMC Consulting was one of five leading consultancies competing for this project and what really stood out to us, apart from the team’s technical expertise, was its level of understanding of user experience. As part of the hub creation, EMC produced technographic profiles for our key customer demographics, which were key in creating the ultimate digital experience for any fashion enthusiast.”

Cyrus Gilbert Rolfe, European practice director at EMC Consulting, said: “New Look Daily has been designed to be integrated with New Look’s e-commerce platform, which makes the customer’s transition between the two sites flawless. We have jointly created a cutting-edge digital experience which would amplify New Look’s brand message and enabled it to engage on a new level with its customers.”

Eamonn Clarke, managing director at Schway, said: “New Look Daily is a fashion first for product placement on UK TV and a first for any fashion retailer to offer customers such interactivity in a social network. In this age of mass customisation, allowing customers to interact with products – creating their own vision – is a powerful differentiator and delivers greater value and loyalty to develop one-to-one customer relationships.”