Monitoring Competitors' Campaign Strategies

You can utilize the Visual Merchandising and Retail Reports sections of EDITED to monitor your competitors’ campaign strategies.

VISUAL MERCHANDISING

The Visual Merchandising section will be the best place to analyze current and past campaigns advertised across email communication and messaging on retailers' direct sites. In this section, by clicking on the Channels filter, you can select to view competitors' homepages, category landing pages, emails, and blog posts. 

Let’s say you wanted to analyze when and how retailers reference Black Friday campaigns and promotions in their communications. First, customize your workbook by filtering on the Regions, Retailers, Genders, and/or Categories you would like to observe. Use the Date filter to narrow down the window of time you would like to analyze, or add multiple custom date ranges to compare.

Below is a sample workbook looking at a few retailers in the US, and filtering on women’s apparel. 

From here, use the keywords filter to search for specific words to narrow down your Visual Merchandising communication search. NOTE: You can only search for single words or numbers in the search bar or keywords filter, not phrases.

For example, if you are looking for communication having to do with Black Friday, you could enter the word 'friday' in the keywords filter when filtering specifically on the months surrounding Thanksgiving.

You can further narrow this selection by using the search bar at the top of your workbook. For example, after applying the keyword phrase “Friday,” you can search for specific discount percentages such as “50%” in the search bar. The workbook will then update, pulling all communication with the searched word present within the selected filters.

Clicking into a retailer’s card will bring up all communication related to the searched terms. 

You can use the Heatmap Analysis tab to see which days had the highest mention of these keywords and on what dates these retailers started communicating about this, which can be grouped by retailer for comparative analysis. Clicking into each update will also show you a screenshot of exactly where these phrases appeared on the page, letting you know what kind of promotional language is being used and how soon before the event your competitors are advertising their campaigns.

In the screenshot below, take a look at the first square in the second to last row, which corresponds to November 1st (each square represents a single day). As you can see, Revolve had no mention of the word “Friday” tracked on this day, however Topshop shows a light green square here, indicating that this was the first day these words were tracked one or more times across communication channels. The darker a square, the higher the frequency of keywords tracked on that particular day, so you will notice that the squares begin to darken in the days surrounding Thanksgiving and Black Friday, as mention of the keyword increased across communication.

You can click on any square to highlight a specific day to see just the communications from that particular day and analyze exactly how the words were used, back in the Updates tab.

RETAIL REPORTS

Retail Reports are published by our team of in-house analysts, providing periodical analysis of key product categories and industry talking points, as well as data-driven analysis on emerging trends, pop culture, and direction for online promotion and campaign planning.

The Planning and Promotion section of Retail Reports is an excellent resource for planning your own campaign strategies. 

Within this section, you will find reports on:

• Events & Opportunities: highlights key moments in the retail calendar - great for promotional plans!
• Key Discounting Moments: analysis on the hottest times of the year for planned sales
• Ad Hoc Planning Reports: looks at a specific product area and how arrivals, sales, and discounts have affected assortments, what was communicated to customers, and what to consider for future assortments

Reports within the Trend & Culture and Social Media & Digital sections will also give you the latest insights on pop culture trends, consumer habits, and trending fashion topics to pay attention to on social media. Taking note of what other retailers and influencers are talking about can help you to monitor competing campaigns and select the best time to plan your promotions and customer outreach.

For a full list of the types of Retail Reports, you can find within EDITED, click here.