London is a diverse city where many brands place their flagship stores. There is a lot of competition for customers between stores, thus we have seen more and more adventurous promotional strategies. Karl Lagerfield's new store display is a promotional strategy in itself. The newspaper window display is all about promoting Lagerfield and his own individual brand, it does not display any clothes, which is unusual, this catches the consumers attention. Once in these stores you can pick up the newspapers all about Lagerfield. This is can inform a wide audience of people about the brand to ensure the knowledge is out there, creating the want and desirability for the brand. In this store they also had iPads displaying catwalk shows and allowing you to upload your changing room selfies straight to Facebook. Although this may not be completely unusual in the current time, it is a good way to promote a brand and communicate themselves to a wide audience they may not always target. Unlike Karl Lagerfield, &OtherStories use a much more traditional way to communicate to their consumers. Around there stores are a variety of posters, either leading to new collections, sales or giving you social networking links or promoting the brand. For example they will have details about who they are working with for collections - this may be famous collaborations. Instead of obvious celebrities, they use well known make up artists, for example, and put this in a poster by the collection. This creates a more down to earth feel with the brand, they are trying to communicate that they do not need big collaborations to highlight the beauty of their clothing, they just need to collaborate to create the best. The simplicity of just posters detailing this around the store also brings the down to earth feel, a more traditional brand. As I walked around this store I felt a lot more relaxed, this may also to do with the store interior and visual merchandising, I came away with the feeling that simplicity was at the core of &OtherStories and they wanted to create an emotional attachment with their consumers. Some other stores had a lot more subtle unusual communication skills, for example one brand did not have their name on the store front, just a small sign hanging from the side. This is intriguing to a customer, draws them in. Others had unusual lighting or manikins - this catches the interest of customers but not necessarily creating a strong promotional campaign within their stores. This is something I found, apart from Lagerfield's and &OtherStories which were my favourite unusual communications, many stores lacked individuality with promotional campaigns. Stores looked different from interiors and visual merchandising but many didn't have a strong communication from within their store, although they may have elsewhere (online for example) I did begin to think, why are bricks and mortar stores being ignored? &OtherStories was the most successful communication for me. The simplicity of just posters around the store made it. In a world so dominated by digital media, I think it is great to see brands still embracing traditional forms of communication, whilst including social networking. We shouldn't forget the pleasure we can have from browsing in a physical store, being able to admire the layout, the design and actual touch/try clothes before we buy. Even though society is so consumed by the Internet and technology, brick and mortar stores will never die, we all want to shop physically and brands should not forget this. This is what I found when looking for unusual forms of communication, brands should not ignore their stores for communication now the online world is growing exponentially.
