DEATH OF PUREPLAY RETAIL
INTELLIGENCE REPORT DEATH OF PUREPLAY RETAIL CUSTOMER ACQUISITION
Store Expansion Builds Brand Equity While an initial store opening often translates into PR buzz, search data suggests that the boost in awareness does not fade after the initial media attention surrounding an e-tailer’s first brick and mortar venture. On the contrary, online traffic tends to increase with the build-out of an offline retail footprint. For the 19 evolved pureplay retailers examined in L2’s analysis, retailers with more stores were searched by-name on Google more frequently per month, suggesting that stores drive increased brand equity. Scale is reached at the 15-store mark; retailers with more than 15 stores averaged roughly double the number of monthly searches than those with fewer than 15 stores (237K searches / month versus 101K searches / month). This relationship is also much stronger than the slight positive relationship (R=0.06) between the years since a retailer’s founding and monthly search volume, suggesting that stores can have even more of an impact than retailer longevity on brand awareness.
Death of Pureplay Retail: Number of Stores vs. Average Monthly Searches for Brand Name September 2015, n=19 Evolved Pureplay Retailers
500K
Birchbox
Athleta
400K
Warby Parker
Nasty Gal
R 2 =0.23751
300K
Rent the Runway
Monthly Keyword Searches
200K
Bonobos
100K
Yogibo
0
0
20
40
60
80
100 Number of Stores
Source: Google Keyword Planner | L2 Intelligence Report: Death of Pureplay Retail, January 2016.
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January 12, 2016
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