In a world where fashion evolves faster than ever, finding the perfect balance between staying on-trend and maintaining your unique style can be a challenge for brands. In this competitive landscape are brands that are staying relevant and redefining their fashion game through exciting marketing campaigns – campaigns where trends meet timelessness! Merging contemporary fashion with their brand ethos, these brands show how to do a marketing campaign right.
In this special feature, BoF Promo Codes, IMAGESBoF.in bring you a collection of some of the best campaigns by brands that have captured the audience’s imagination and have resulted in profits.
This week, the spotlight is on LuLu Mall’s campaign, Midnight Sale which won the IMAGES Most Admired Marketing Campaign of the Year in the Discount Sales category for this marketing strategy at India Fashion Forum 2023.
LuLu Mall – under the aegis of the LuLu International Group in the UAE – launched its first mall in India in 2013. At present, LuLu has 5 operational malls in India – Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram, Thrissur, Bengaluru and Lucknow.
About the Campaign: The LuLu mall in Kochi aimed to give its people the freedom and luxury of late-night shopping after the chaos of everyday living like work, traveling in peak traffic hours and other commitments comes to a close.
To further this agenda, they came up with the Midnight Sale in July 2022, where participating brands in the malls sold their products at a flat 50% discount. Although the campaign was launched to allow shoppers to purchase their daily needs in a more peaceful atmosphere, it received an overwhelming response that instantly went viral.
Objective: The Midnight sale was organized as a part of LuLu Mall’s highly successful End of Season Sale (EOSS) promotions, which are usually conducted twice a year. Giving people a chance to own branded fashion products and electronic items at a discounted rate made the EOSS a huge hit.
The mall’s yearly discounted sale became a much-awaited event, and in 2022, the Midnight Sale broke all records. The sale also served as a curtain raiser for the flat 50% sale to follow, which offered customers 3 days of never-ending deals on the best of fashion, electronics, groceries and more from LuLu Fashion Store, LuLu Hypermarket & LuLu Connect.
The Midnight Sale & Flat 50 sale was formulated after a careful study of the market, assessing competitor strategies, and analyzing insights from the customers, which made people curious about the event and eventually show up in large numbers.
Execution: To create a buzz and popularize both of their sale events, Lulu Mall used offline, online, and in-store promotional strategies which included –
- Offline Promotions: Paper Insert/A4 Leaflet, Newspaper Ads, branding in Metro train and on pillars:
— Paper inserts/flyers are a proven way to improve sales. Customers rely on paper inserts when researching offers on products that they plan on buying and enjoy browsing to discover even more options.
— Newspaper Advertising has been one of the oldest and most widespread forms of advertising for different brands, products, and services. Lulu Mall used both of these mediums to their advantage to make their message reach a large audience.
- Online Promotions: Influencer marketing, Radio Ads, Paid Ads through social media, SMS and email marketing.
— Influencer Marketing: Influencers are modern-day leaders in fashion, lifestyle and all other latest trends. Many come with a large social following base, which makes them the best choice for brands to promote their products through. To the general audience, they appear as experts or trustworthy sources of information which in turn makes marketing for brands a lot easier.
Using these factors as leverage, the mall collaborated with influencers to promote its Midnight Sale campaign. This was done to make the campaign reach its target audience directly.
— Radio Ads: LuLu Mall tapped into attractive radio spots on regional radio stations to promote their campaign-specific products and services that were on offer. By promoting through regional radio, they were instantly able to reach large numbers of people who were spread across the city.
— Paid Ads on Social Media: Facebook and Google Ads are both market-leading ‘pay-per-click’ advertising platforms. Here, advertisers can have their ad displayed and pay for each click that their ad receives.
Facebook Ads is a paid social ad platform with extensive audience targeting options, while Google Ads is a paid ad search platform that relies primarily on Google users’ keyword searches.
With the support of its efficient digital marketing team, Lulu Mall extensively promoted its campaigns through multiple social media platforms.
The overall social media campaign reach was 6.8 million+ and 16.4 million+ impressions.
- SMS & Email Marketing: SMS and email marketing are two very complementary channels. The mall promoted its campaigns through both these channels, using email for including more detailed information and SMS to communicate more time-sensitive or urgent information.
- In-store Promotions: In-store decors.
During every campaign, decorations were installed inside the mall in the campaign theme. These included digital arches at the store entrance for digital communication, danglers from the ceiling that conveyed the flat 50% message, hanging boards, easel boards, and communication boards were also placed all over the shop floor.
Spokespersons of the LuLu Group said that the midnight shopping intended to ensure that the public can experience nightlife with less traffic, where they can purchase their daily needs in a more peaceful atmosphere. The midnight sale was on a trial basis and going forward sale will be organized for more days.
They added, “We are aware that there could be a lot of hindrances and drawbacks initially. However, we will study all those aspects and see how we can introduce this in a full-phased manner in the future.”
