Many retail brands make the mistake of getting sucked into a price spiral on Singles’ Day instead of focusing on brand attributes and consumer needs, according to one of China’s leading retail marketers.

Jalin Wu, chief marketing officer at UNIQLO China, one of the country’s biggest retail brands, believes that “What really differentiates about Singles’ Day is brand trust, product quality, why the consumer wants to buy at this moment, [and] better service."

“These are the real differentiators that show the power of a brand,” he said in an interview with WARC. (For WARC’s exclusive story on how UNIQLO used data to create a true omnichannel retail experience, click here.)

UNIQLO elects not to define customers in China as online or offline specifically, but rather provides a true omnichannel retail experience.

In its 2017 Singles Day campaign, for example, UNIQLO worked alongside its media agency, Mindshare China, to identify the top five product lines from those that sold well in-store but fared poorly online. They designed creative approaches featuring different product lines, offering coupons and ‘lower in-store prices’, then targeted these messages to all consumers with the five product lines in their shopping cart on Singles’ Day.

When consumers were close to a UNIQLO store, the coupon value dynamically increased, and shoppers were treated with smart shop assistants and speedy in-store checkout. Foot traffic to UNIQLO's stores was ten times higher than during Singles’ Day the previous year and each offline Singles’ Day order was of 34% higher value compared with online.

The campaign also won the Customer Journey Special Award in the 2018 WARC Prize for Asian Strategy. (Read UNIQLO China’s award-winning case study for Singles Day here.)

With a strong physical retail presence and a wealth of consumer purchase data to draw on, Wu considers UNIQLO ideally placed to provide a seamless O2O experience.

“We think we have great power to integrate the consumers’ needs and provide them an online-to-offline solution,” he said.

“We just try to integrate lots of consumer insights and give them the things they really need. We use very targeted media to talk to them. We know where they are, what message they want – rather than just price – and we talk to them precisely so that we can really give this content a very good ROI result.”

Sourced from WARC