“Data Supremacy” -- the almost instant feedback on the performance of almost any element an online retailer puts up on the site – might seem to be the natural enemy of pure creativity marching to a different drummer. But to be successful, online marketers must find a way to juggle both, Charming Shoppes’ Interactive Division Creative Director Karen Gutkowski will tell attendees at the Shop.Org Summit.
Gutkowski, participating in the panel, “Letting Creativity Flourish I Online Retail’s ROI-Intensive Environment,” has developed an approach that accommodates both issues. Her small team essentially functions as an online creative agency for Charming Shoppe’s three e-commerce sites, the web sites of store retailers Lane Bryant, Catherine’s and Fashion Bug. Gutkowski’s strategy is a browser-based tool kit approach that allows the band managers to control creative content in real time, adjusting it quickly to stay in synch with rapidly-changing developments in the stores.
Gutkowski says about 80% of pages on the three sites are dynamic. We’ve build browser-based tools that let someone go in and enter html text, select from a stockpile we have built, with something we have used in the past or have built with guilders that display text in certain fonts with different background colors,” she says.
The templates and tool kit are a way to balance the need for online creative with rapidly-changing store events and a corporate decision to keep what's in the stores consistent with what’s on the web. “In terms of creative, we can plan out whole season and say for instance, this promotion will run on this week. But if something doesn't ship on time, we sell out, or a sale changes at the last minute, instead of having to reinvent everything weave incorporated into the artwork, we’ve tried to separate that out. So we have the branding imagery in one piece and also the ability to control the look and feel of the real time content.”
Gutkowski adds that fact that the interactive team is entirely in-house makes it easier to balance creative on the site with what is going on in the stores by helping it stay a couple of steps ahead of the creative content brand manager ask for. “If there is no place in it for last minute changes, no place for sale information or promotions, experience tells us we need to build it in even though they didn't ask for it,” she says.
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