TOWER London Back To Uni 2019
📅 2019
✏️ photo editing, graphic design
👥 1 stylist and VM, 1 photographer, 1 SMM, 1 CRM, 1 Head of Marketing
Case and Brief
Tower London is an independent footwear retailer,
quintessentially from London, trading all over Europe and beyond. In 2019 Tower has launched their own Back To Uni campaign for the first time, following the yearly success of the Back To School campaign.
Targeted to a unisex, young adult audience, the campaign showcases products by a selection of 7 fashion footwear and accessories brands.
The shooting concept is playful, with two clean-faced models and pop set colours:
to complement it, I developed some slanted typography and neat, flat graphics keeping consistency with the Tower London brand guidelines.
The challenge
Develop the look & feel both on digital channels and in-store as a new and original campaign, keeping in mind the brand’s guidelines and the partner brands’ commercial requirements.
Edit the raw images, selecting the ‘hero’ images in accordance with the partner brands and in line with Tower’s commercial needs.
final edited assets
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final edited assets -
Solution
Deliverables:
3 homepage main banners on rotation over 3 weeks, featuring in turn the 7 brands involved in the campaign;
5 targeted newsletters;
9 social media posts;
2 sets of 3 posters to feature in 4 London stores (diversified posters depending on stock holding and merchandising in each store).
Campaign results
As this was the very first Back to Uni co-branded campaign for the small retailer, it was paramount to assess its results. Coming right after the Back to School period and before the Black Friday and Christmas gifting period (both being the most important source of traffic & purchases for the business), it was decided to go ahead with Back to Uni exactly because of its strategic timing. Thanks to this and helped by 7 sponsoring brands, the campaign scored a resounding success, attracting online the same amount of traffic and conversions as Back to School that year.
In addition, the posters in the store windows attracted more footfall within the participating stores, in a time during which the offline side of the business was starting to show its weaknesses against the online counterpart. Because of it, the Regional Manager decided to postpone the end of the campaign, keeping the posters in the window to attract more customers in.
The seven partner brands that sponsored the initiative also registered a heightened interest from the public. As a result, at least three brands tightened the partnership with the retailer and agreed on new exclusive marketing activations, collaborating on branded marketing operations designed by Tower on a regular basis. This Back to Uni campaign and the others that followed contributed to Tower’s reputation in the industry and its heightened positioning in the footwear retail space as a brand.
My takeaways
For this campaign, the Marketing team tackled it with a different approach than usual: as we were short on time and all stemmed from a big photoshoot involving many brands, in order to cut one week back of waiting for the photographer edits, I was tasked to do the edits myself. Visuals had to be approved both internally and by the sponsoring brands.
I got involved since the photoshoot phase, collaborating on art direction, so I was familiar with the images in advance. With the help of the Buying team (they kept communication with brands & knew the stock levels of the product featured), we chose hero pictures for each brand, reducing the edits to just few images. I asked for a thorough breakdown of what was agreed with brands, including expected live dates for each brand involved. Thanks to this close collaboration, I worked on the edits splitting the workload over the 3 deadlines, and delivered on time despite the bigger workload. The challenge became an opportunity to teamwork, as I asked for help and set myself realistic deliverables.