“When people dress with confidence, they have the ability to set the tone. Be it a big meeting, time with loved ones, or your community, our new brand platform champions the idea that when we feel our best, we can give back and do good for those around us,”
- Trinh Tham, former Chief Marketing Officer at Harry Rosen
In the past couple of years, Harry Rosen is taking an unconventional approach in promotion. As a luxury retailer, Harry Rosen has taken a step to accelerate their growth in sportswear category. Last week, I had the opportunity to attend a sharing session by Paul Michel, Senior Manager in Performance Marketing & Media at Harry Rosen. I would like to share my takeaways from Paul’s presentation about his career journey and how Harry Rosen takes their steps beyond digital to Performance Marketing.
A little bit about Harry Rosen and Paul Michel
Founded in 1954, Harry Rosen is the leading luxury menswear retailer in Canada. With 17 retail stores operating in 7 markets, they offer several collections of fine menswear labels, including Armani, Brioni, Hugo Boss, Burberry, Canali, Dolce & Gabbana, Kiton and Ermenegildo Zegna. Harry Rosen is known for providing a personalised and outstanding customer experience.
Meanwhile Paul Michel specializes in Performance Marketing of the brand, contributing to the tremendous success of Harry Rosen. During his time in Wilfrid Laurier University majoring in BBA Marketing, he successfully landed his co-op placements at Blackberry & General Motors Canada. After more than 4 years in The Aber Group, which is an advertising and marketing agency, as his first job, he decided to switch to client side to work as Harry Rosen. Now, Paul plays an important role in driving growth, increasing profitability, and raising awareness for Harry Rosen.
Role of a Performance Marketing Manager
When it comes to digital marketing, normally online channel is your only focus to run digital ads. Your goals are really focused on that online journey such as Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). There is nothing wrong with focusing on media planning, executing media reporting, and optimizing as a digital marketer. However, we often overlook the importance of customer journey.
Paul shared his day-today as a performance marketer with us to give us a more integrated and holistic view as being a performance marketer.
Planning: Performance marketing includes not only digital, but also the ideation of campaigns, target setting, and budgeting.
Performance Budgeting: It is critical to be the active voice within the company to encourage departments to hit the target goal and bring in new clients both in store and online.
Conversion Analysis & Optimisation: Analysis does not only limit to tracking the right metric, but it is also about the process of improvement.
Journey Mapping & Creative Briefs: Landing page, website loading time, UX and UI in customer perspective are some of the factors performance marketers look at in this journey. While in this fragmented media landscape, marketers are responsible for optimizing each of the social media platforms to come up with the best possible creative possible.
Omni-Channel Focus: There is an inseparable tying between advertisement online to in-store behaviour. For Harry Rosen, they use appointment bookings as a metric to measure the impact of a digital advertising on their in-store business. This mechanism provides an optimal outcome for the business.
Social Media & Listening: Listen to what your customers are saying and be relevant with the advertising, and make sure the feedback loop is incorporated.
Segmentation & Loyalty: Making sure company’s customer relations team is integrating with corresponding strategy.
The key factor to bear in mind as a Performance Marketing Manager is “customer first”. We need to understand what the role of digital marketing is within the broader customer journey.
Digital Media Journey at Harry Rosen
Speaking of “customer first”, Paul listed 12 important steps of the digital media journey at Harry Rosen. The foundation of an effective advertising is relevance, which in this journey, we can define relevance as “customer data”.
Priority: Learn about our customers & macro-trends
For me, learning about our customers and macro-trends would be the first step to prioritize because it is crucial, especially if I'm beginning a new position in this industry. I might ask internally about client information such as seasonality and customer preferences. It serves as the basis for a thorough understanding of the consumers' needs. In order to distinguish your brand from competitors, we also need to keep updated on the macro picture of where your company is within the overall industry as well as the macro trend within this market.
Priority: Understanding what success looks like
Understanding what success looks like is the second most important step. To generate revenue, we as digital marketers require a specific business goal. The reason for this is that we must understand the implications of a marketing campaign's results for the company before reporting them.
How We Evaluate Success?
Talking about marketing campaign result, Performance Marketers take different ways to evaluate success. Here are the KPIs that we normally look at for specific goals.
Harry Rosen has recently changed and wants to be perceived as more contemporary and inclusive than beyond suit. Performance Marketing Manager can monitor their progress using these KPIs. These KPIs demonstrate the effectiveness of the marketing campaign "Set the Tone," regardless of whether they achieve their business aim of greater market penetration.
Q&A Session with Paul
During the Q&A session, a question was raised:
Would you like to share a specific strategy for specific goal?
Paul showed us a fantastic example of how Harry Rosen builds its wedding business plan. They conducted research on the most popular channels to position advertisements for marketing among grooms, which turned out to be Pinterest. Paul also indicated that one of the search tactics the marketer team would do would be to attend weddings and collect email addresses. These tactics made me think of the crucial performance marketing principle, "customer first," that Paul highlighted. To develop any tactics, a successful marketer must first imagine themselves as the target audience. When making decisions, it is always a good idea to look at customer data and acquire customer insights.
Case Study – Golf Clothing
For a while, Harry Rosen's mainstay has been offering the best assortment of men's suits and tailoring, earning them a solid reputation in the process. They want to be more than just that. Paul said that they want men to visit Harry Rosen for all of their apparel and footwear needs, making it the ultimate clothing shop for men. They aim to alter how the brand is perceived.
In the case study, a marketing campaign emphasizing golf apparel—including polos, shorts, caps, sneakers, and belts—was shown to us. We dug into a variety of topics such as its competitors, success metrics, customer segmentation, channels, and creatives. Working on the case study taught me that, as a performance marketer, my responsibility extends beyond paid advertisements but requires me to understand my consumers' viewpoint at every stage of their journey. Think about this case study as if it was your first time playing golf. You want to have the same style and dress code as everyone else on the golf course to fit in and show that you belong. A performance marketer approaches understanding the source of inspiration behind customer purchases in this way.
Career Insights
During the seminar, Paul mentioned the opportunity to apply for the performance marketing internship at Harry Rosen. Having a background in fashion myself, I find it to be a good career. I have a love for learning how to use data to generate insights, which can then be used to generate strategies. There are so many stages to work on as a performance marketer throughout the entire journey rather than limiting myself to "digital." I think a profession in performance marketing is both challenging and enjoyable at the same time in this dynamic fashion industry.
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