Our CEO, Andrew Swinand, takes a look at the content challenges facing high-street retailers. Using John Lewis Partnership as an example, Andrew explains how brands can start to produce more content for less through a technology-led approach.

The high street is, rather ironically, at a crossroads. While footfall across these stores is down (as much as 2.3% this summer compared to 2023, according to MRI Software’s recent Consumer Pulse Survey), the mainstays of our town centres do have an explosion of new and exciting channels to connect with their consumers. The obvious difficulty is that consumers themselves also enjoy a wealth of choice over where to shop, particularly online – leaving retailers fighting for attention. Cutting through the noise has never been more important, but to do so these brands need a huge volume of personalised, channel-specific content.

It’s what I refer to as halo content. You’ve got the hero creative, the binding concept at the heart of every campaign, that tugs at the heartstrings, tickles the funny bone and generally defines the brand. Great creative ideas are absolutely necessary but also just the start. Where brands tend to struggle is activating that compelling idea and translating it across every channel – with consistency, quality and speed.

The content production bottleneck

The problem here is that marketing budgets and resources haven’t scaled concurrently with the exponential rise in channels. The same can be said of most agency models, which simply weren’t built to deliver halo content across digital platforms, social media, in-store screens, print POS, email, e-commerce (to name just a few). The result? Retailers end up with a ‘spray and pray’ approach, churning out low-quality, untargeted, generic content in a desperate attempt to reach their audience on as many touchpoints as possible.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s the quintessential marketing challenge that I see almost every time we pitch for new clients. So, how can you strike a balance between content that’s high quality, engaging and personalised, versus the volume and speed at which it’s required?

Tech-powered production with John Lewis Partnership

Technology, as ever, offers the solution. The right marketing technology platform will connect a brand’s teams, agencies and geographies on a single, streamlined system of record, enabling faster processes and reduced time to market.

ITG’s work with John Lewis Partnership (JLP) is a case in point. Earlier this year we were appointed to form a dedicated in-house content production agency with the high-street icon – enabled by our proprietary Storyteq Content Marketing Platform (CMP) and driven by JLP’s desire to better connect with John Lewis and Waitrose customers through more relevant, engaging, high-quality content.

Our CMP automates previously manual processes for JLP, simplifying campaign planning, workflows, approvals and resource management to enhance the speed and agility of campaign activation. JLP assets are now stored on the Storyteq DAM, increasing findability and ensuring that the best content is maximised across every channel, informed by rich data and deep insights.

Content automation is also pivotal to achieving the volume JLP need. No designer worth their salt got into this industry to sit resizing content for different formats five days a week. Through use of dynamic templates, content variations are now produced automatically in a matter of seconds, freeing in-house creatives from the tedium of manual amends and empowering them to do what they do best – develop the hero concepts that set JLP apart.

MarTech alone won’t save the high street

JLP are a MarTech success story. However, research from Gartner shows that overall usage of marketing technology actually dropped between 2022 and 2023, from 42% to just 33% (having been way up at 58% in 2020). That’s a concerning statistic, but one that reflects the importance of getting the right technology platform for your needs, and ensuring it’s fully integrated and compatible with the rest of your tech stack.

I spoke to another high-street brand recently who had spent over £10m on various marketing technologies, only to find they had no means of stitching them all together, leaving teams siloed on different systems. It’s something we run up against regularly, which is why we have a team dedicated to technology integrations, unravelling these complex platforms to form a single, coherent tech ecosystem.

Marketing technology is key to the survival of the high street – but only if brands select the tech that’s right for them, and a team that can implement it effectively. Content production is a challenge that’s not going away, and it’s only by adapting ways of working and adopting innovative new processes that brands will be able to deliver content at the scale, speed and quality that consumers now demand.