At the 2024 Zalando Partner Marketing Awards: Brands Unite With Zalando Best Practices to Optimise Their Retail Media Marketing Strategies

On the evening of September 25, Zalando Partner Marketing Services (ZMS), the retail media unit of online multi-brand fashion platform Zalando, hosted its fourth annual Partner Awards at the Napoleon Komplex in Berlin.

An initiative which platforms ZMS and its value for brands selling through the online retailer, the awards celebrates Zalando’s partnerships and the development of branded partner campaigns in three categories: Creative & Storytelling — for campaigns which demonstrate particular creativity and entertainment value; Seasonal & Category — for campaigns which highlight peak traffic moments in the e-commerce calendar, such as the holiday season or Cyber Week (the week after Thanksgiving in the US); and Self-Service — for campaigns which leverage ZMS’ self-service advertising tool, the Ad Manager, through which brands can run campaigns autonomously on Zalando.

Zalando is a leading European e-commerce platform for fashion and lifestyle, with more than 560 million visits per month and roughly 50 million customers across 25 markets. With access to this data, ZMS supports partner campaigns and informs how to optimise their marketing and sales impact on Zalando. However, the marketing awards are not only for promoting best practices on the platform, but for equipping partners for success at Zalando and beyond.

A core value at ZMS is providing an educational community for their partners, where best practices around successful advertising slots on the platform can be shared and learned. This year, the awards are combined with the Zalando Partner Day to provide those partners outside of the nominees with an opportunity to learn from the ceremony and from industry peers.

In order to apply, brands must hand in a case study and all information about the campaigns they are entering, before a panel of judges from Zalando pre-select three nominee brands for each category — the winners are then announced at the live ceremony. Winners receive their choice of one of the three insights packages and nominees are granted campaign vouchers for the Ad Manager.

To discover more about the nominated campaigns and their results, download the winning campaigns case study booklet here, or watch the results ceremony on demand via this link.

Creative & Storytelling

The winner of the Creative & Storytelling category was global fashion brand Lacoste, who recently produced an exclusive, retro-inspired capsule on Zalando. A key goal behind the accompanying campaign was to change the brand perception among Gen-Z — to demonstrate a more inclusive and progressive approach to brand messaging.

A study by ZMS’ adjacent insights team found that the campaign “changed the way Zalando customers perceive the brand,” citing that previous words associated with customers had been “elegant, vintage, premium and masculine,” but with their repositioning on the platform, customers now used words such as “sexy, exciting and feminine.” ZMS also found that the campaign had a 79 percent offline reach across 18-24 year-olds, its target audience.

Brand storytelling contributes to better brand recall among consumers. In a study conducted in May by personalisation software platform One Spot, 92 percent of consumers said they want ads to feel like a story, while 56 percent of consumers said that the best brands are those that tell stories. Furthermore, with increased demands and expectations around authenticity and representation, brands which insert themselves in narratives within cultural activations are those that resonate the most with consumers.

This is due to the fact that 69 percent of luxury shoppers agree that the brand they wear expresses something about them, with 77 percent of teens agreeing with the same statement, according to a survey by Ipsos. The same survey also found that Gen-Z are buying or investing in luxury from a younger age — Millennials on average began spending on luxury at the age of 20, but for Gen-Z this age has dropped to 15, creating new opportunities for brands advertising on Zalando.

The marketing campaigns in this category operated both in-person and online activations. While Lacoste activated the capsule collection through social media outlets, the brand also partnered with Zalando France to open a maze in the centre of Paris for a weekend, where each room was inspired by a piece from the collection. Hidden clues displayed via QR codes allowed attendees to uncover the collection and win various prizes. Zalando and Lacoste also partnered with French fashion creators, attracting further attention through out-of-home (OOH) placements around the French capital.

Physical experiences have been proven to further increase recall — with scientific studies showing that if you experience something in-person, you are 80 percent more likely to accurately remember details of the event, which is a significant increase from 10 percent for seeing a static image and 20 percent for a moving image. Providing experiences that accurately reflect the desires of a brand community are thus increasingly effective marketing tools.

Lacoste’s rich heritage in sport — with its founder, René Lacoste, a tennis world champion — provides the brand with ample opportunity to insert itself in cultural events. For instance, Lacoste’s ongoing partnership with tennis tournament Roland-Garros sees the brand produce a co-branded lifestyle collection every year around the time of The French Open.

Sports partnerships in particular provide fertile ground for meaningful brand activations. As Tom Chapman, a WAA sports agent, recently told BoF, “[Fashion partnerships] probably pay the least, but can give you the most cultural relevance from a marketing standpoint. “All brands want powerful images. But in fashion imagery, you have to work hard to create a story. With sports the story is made for you, and reality is the ultimate art director.”

Seasonal & Category

For entrants in this category, ads were strategically centred and timed around a particular period in the calendar. The winners, Ralph Lauren, aimed to take advantage of the holiday season. Indeed, in 2022, retail sales during this period increased 5.4 percent, according to the National Retail Federation. In 2021, they rose 12.7 percent, the largest percentage increase in at least 20 years.

ZMS praised Ralph Lauren for its “key look strategy” that saw the brand identify key styles which they felt would resonate with holiday shoppers, activating the campaign across multiple touchpoints. Its Zalando homepage takeover, for instance, was accompanied by product-focused social assets, which reflected the campaign imagery.

As such, Ralph Lauren identified an opportunity for brand heat. This is well timed, since according to market research company Circana, 85 percent of consumers plan to include online shopping in their holiday plans this year, up from 80 percent in 2020. Furthermore, Forrester estimates that 60 percent of all US sales are now influenced by digital experiences and predicts that this will grow to 70 percent by 2027.

Meanwhile, factors affecting the attention economy have evolved significantly as the way we consume and engage with content both on and offline has changed. Today, audiences typically use multiple devices concurrently — indeed, a Media Science study commissioned by TikTok in 2023 found that 99 percent of surveyed individuals used their phone while watching TV, with 84 percent of those surveyed saying they focused their attention on mobile during TV commercial breaks.

This behavioural shift has had a significant impact on the efficacy of advertising and marketing. Gen-Z, for instance, loses active attention for ads after just 1.3 seconds, according to a global study by Yahoo, Omnicom Media Group and Amplified Intelligence.

While achieving cut-through in these circumstances is increasingly difficult, brands can succeed by garnering brand heat and underpinning cultural moments, such as those typical of Ralph Lauren as an early lifestyle brand.

A recent TikTok post from the brand’s account featured Lucky Blue Smith interviewing children backstage at the Ralph Lauren Kids show during New York Fashion Week. A playful interpretation of a standard approach to backstage branded content at fashion weeks, the video went viral, reaching over 13 million views.

Self-Service

ZMS awarded the Self-Service prize to Scandinavian menswear brand Blend. The campaign’s aim was to drive awareness and sales in core Zalando markets, such as Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Belgium and France, by employing Zalando’s marketing tools to set up and measure product-driven ZMS campaigns and respond to the data accordingly.

ZMS praised Blend for their 244 percent sales increase over the course of the campaign and their ability to respond to relevant KPIs on the Ad Manager dashboard, which allowed Blend to react swiftly to influences like low visibility. As a result, Blend’s campaign reached more than 10 million impressions and resulted in a 240 percent uplift in gross merchandise volume (GMV).

The concept of self-service marketing removes the barriers to action, allowing brands to adapt and respond to the zeitgeist in a timely manner. This is key in an age where the trend cycle has been accelerated by platforms like TikTok hosting niche online subcultures, each with their own lore.

Brands which respond to the zeitgeist swiftly grant them entrance to such communities. On X in June 2024, a user shared an image of an heirloom tomato cut in half, writing: “This tomato is so Loewe I can’t explain it.” The post quickly went viral on multiple platforms and was reposted by Loewe’s designer Jonathan Anderson. Identifying an opportunity to translate this into branded activity, Anderson revealed a prototype of the “Tomato Bag”, captioned “meme to reality” just three days after the first post was shared on X.

As Kory Marchisotto, chief marketing officer at cosmetics brand E.l.f., recently told BoF, “Tapping into the cultural zeitgeist is about speed. If your organisation removes the obstacles that slow things down, then you are able to move in tandem with your community and make them see you as their neighbour, rather than some distant figure.”

While two-thirds of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, only 32 percent of executives say they are capable of converting data into personalised prices, offers and products in real time across all, according to research by The Future Laboratory, putting the decision-makers behind Blend’s campaign in a comparatively unique position of autonomy.

This is a sponsored feature paid for by Zalando Marketing Services as part of a BoF partnership.