Retail

Retail Industry Trends : From groceries to placemaking, retail is becoming more immersive, expressive, dramatic and hyper-personalised.

News 07.02.2019

Need to Know

Toyota rewards safe driving, Veg Power positions vegetables as the enemy of children and offline friendships are still important for digitally native teens.

Expensify’s latest ad is an interactive music video

Expensify This by 2 Chainz and Adam Scott

US – The latest music video from rapper 2 Chainz doubles as a campaign for the expense management service.

Originally created as a Super Bowl ad, Expensify has released the full, four-minute version as an official music video for 2 Chainz. The song, Expensify This, becomes an interactive video that features several QR code receipts attached to luxury items like a gold jet ski and diamond football. Viewers are encouraged to scan the codes as the video plays, expensing them through the app in order to win a cash prize.

The video puts an elaborate spin on workplace expenses, a task that is often avoided due to its mundane and repetitive nature. ‘Expenses used to take up more time and brain space than they deserve, until Expensify boldly solved this for everyone,’ says John McKelvey, executive creative director at JohnXHannes, the creative agency behind the campaign. ‘With the brand's first ever ad debuting at Super Bowl and a never-before-done music video, Expensify showcases their unmatched brave spirit.’

To combat skip culture, music videos are offering brands new opportunities for product placement. For more, read our microtrend Beyond Product Placement.

Counting the environmental cost of e-commerce

Highway Fitting by Fashion Revolution Highway Fitting by Fashion Revolution
Highway Fitting by Fashion Revolution Highway Fitting by Fashion Revolution

Belgium – Fashion Revolution, the global movement championing reform in the fashion industry, has launched a campaign to raise awareness of the environmental cost of e-commerce.

The Highway Fitting campaign is an attempt to make consumers stop and consider the environmental impact of their shopping habits. According to Fashion Revolution, 40% of clothing bought online is sent back to the retailer. This overuse of free returns policies is putting a particular strain on both the environment and brands by increasing last-mile delivery traffic.

‘Instead of the two-way drive of a delivery van bringing a package to you, it now has to drive back to your house to return it to the retailer,’ says Chloé Mikolajczak, country coordinator of Fashion Revolution Belgium. ‘On a global scale, this has a massive impact on the environment and traffic.’

Brands and retailers are also looking to curb the rise of serial returns, with UK retailers such as Asos and Harrods now taking steps to blacklist shoppers who regularly buy, wear and return items.

Toyota is gamifying the car subscription model

Japan – Kinto is a new car subscription service by Toyota that rewards its customers for safe driving.

The programme will have two tiers: Kinto One, which allows customers to drive one Toyota vehicle, and Kinto Select, which offers a choice of six vehicles, including Lexus models. Both are offered for a monthly fixed sum for a three-year period.

According to Toyota, the service will ‘award points to customers based on their vehicle usage such as for safe or ecological driving’. While the brand has not released any more information, TechCrunch reports on the assumption that the vehicle’s in-car system will monitor the customer’s driving skills, and reward points that they can apply towards future vehicle access.

As well as demonstrating how Luxury Cars On Demand can incentivise subscribers, Toyota is positioning itself as a Civic Brand by encouraging safer driving.

Toyota

Veg Power positions greens as the enemy of children

Eat Them To Defeat Them by ITV & Veg Power

UK – Vegetables are being touted as the enemy in a playful ad campaign designed to get kids to eat their greens.

Created by food marketing fund Veg Power and tv channel ITV, Eat Them To Defeat Them aims to improve the health of children and teenagers by turning eating vegetables into battle play. In a bid to inspire better eating, the tongue-in-cheek advert enlists the help of children to help stop vegetables from taking over the world. Backed by an alliance of 11 supermarkets, including Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose, the national campaign was created with support from advertising agency adam&eve/DDB.

According to Veg Power, 80% of kids and 96% of teenagers in the UK do not eat enough vegetables. Meanwhile, according to some estimates, up to one third of primary schoolchildren are overweight or obese. Such health and weight concerns are being exacerbated by the daily pressure and confusion parents face as they navigate today’s food and snacking landscape. In a dedicated Opinion piece, Beth Bentley, global vice-president of strategy at Virtue Worldwide, discusses why brands play a crucial role in demystifying children’s nutrition.

Stat: Social media is not affecting teens’ offline friendships

Teenagers who are almost constantly online are just as likely to socialise with their friends face to face, according to a new study of 13–17-year-olds by Pew Research Center. Contrary to popular opinion, highly connected teens are spending more time with their friends than their lesser-connected peers. Specifically, 24% of teens who report being online almost constantly are meeting their friends in person every day or almost every day, compared to 23% of teens who are online less frequently.

With young people maintaining face-to-face contact with their friends, this points to the opportunity for physical spaces that are targeted at younger people. With a lack of recognised leisure spaces to frequent, coffee shops have become a comfortable space for teenagers. However, with Costa Coffee rolling out a policy to ask young customers for ID when ordering products containing caffeine, our latest Opinion piece argues that high streets are in need of new, youth-focused social spaces.

Thought-starter: Will precision medicine transform healthcare?

Roy Smythe, the former CEO for Health Informatics at Philips, on why AI and crowdsourcing data tools are integral to the future of healthcare.

AI and advanced computing will make medicine more humane for both clinicians and patients, according to Roy Smythe. ‘Platforms like Philips’ AI-driven HealthSuite Insights will also help with the decision-making,’ he says. ‘In the future, AI will be able to provide a surgeon with insights from 10m patients in real time and so the time it will take to develop a treatment plan will be halved.’

Smythe believes access and convenience are the most pressing issues for the healthcare sector. But virtual care platforms have the potential to change this. ‘Through the pooling of people’s data… We will be able to give the general public the tools to manage much more of their own care.’

For more on the future of health and wellbeing, read the full Q&A here.

Somneo Sleep Wake Up Light by Philips
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