Digital Marketing Metrics (MAR7509-A)

Introduction:

Lululemon is a company that deals with men’s and women’s technical athletic apparel. The company in itself is yoga-inspired, and it originated from an establishment that was a design studio by day and operated as a yoga studio at night. It later became a store in the year 2000 November. The company was founded in 1998 by Chip Wilson in Vancouver, Canada. Lululemon operates in the sportswear industry, mainly yoga wears, athletic wear, and other lifestyle apparel and accessories (Yahoo! Finance, 2022). Their products include yoga pants, tops, shorts, jackets, sweaters, undergarments, water bottles, yoga mats, personal care products such as deodorant, bags, and hair accessories.

Lululemon Athletica’s main target customers are women who put great significance in the maintenance of healthy and active lifestyles while still managing family and work. Lululemon’s demographic profile is driven by women aged 16-35 years. Women and men in the upper middle economic class make up the current target market. In the current year, lululemon currently has 29,000 employees who operate in their 574 stores worldwide (macro trends. net). The vision of lululemon Athletica company is to be a brand that experiments and ignites a community of individuals who live “the sweat life through sweat, grow and connect” (macro trends. net).

Digital Strategy:

Lululemon is a well-known brand for athletic apparel, especially for upper-middle-class people. Since the stores retail most of everything needed for spots and any athletic activities, it was automatic that athletic shoes become one product available for customers at some point. This came into actualization in 2022, when the first shoe model was produced (Yahoo! Finance, 2022).

The need for customers to get all their athletic needs fulfilled in one place is what lululemon aims to satisfy. The company is launching a new product in the market: athletic shoes. Since lululemon Athletica already has a customer base, the new product aims to fulfill their needs while attracting new customers. There are significant chances of the product promoting high growth to the existing portfolio, which will, in the end, improve the brand image of the company.

Ansoff Matrix

Lululemon Athletica is going to utilize the Ansoff matrix to increase sales through the strategy of product development. Product development relies on the result of a new product or modification of an already existing product to appear fresh and offer them in the existing market. Being one of its kind, lululemon offering athletic shoes in the stores on top of other athleisure products will put the company at a higher competitive advantage due to the one-stop advantage. By producing and selling shoes, lululemon gains the one-stop advantage as clients can get all their athletic needs in one store. To ensure the success of the product and to offer customer satisfaction, lululemon will provide all the information on the activewear brand that was launched in the summer of 2022 and also the slide that is recovery-focused, named Westfield. This includes all the shoe specifications, make, and sizes available. The strategy of product development is not high risk as it allows the brand to develop a compelling and effective strategy for the new products in the market that is already in existence (Manuel, 2022).

Segmentation, Targeting & Positioning

Segmentation

Market segmentation mainly involves identifying a market segment to push a product into the market. The market segmentation criteria that we use is homogeneity. Lululemon aims to satisfy customers’ athletic needs, including full-body apparel, complete with the new footwear product, as an additional product in the lululemon portfolio, which is bound to garner positive customer response. This, in turn, reduces risk and increases return on investment. The company employs behavioral segmentation as it helps the company analyze customers’ decision-making patterns. In this type of segmentation, it is apparent that customers will be more satisfied with getting all they need in one store. This means getting sports footwear, and athletic apparel will satisfy their needs.

Targeting

The target market for all lululemon products is men and women in the upper middle class. The shoes produced and sold in lululemon stores strictly target the already existing market, mainly women between the ages of 16-35, all in the upper-middle-class economic group.

Positioning

Essentially, lululemon has established a wide customer base in the sports apparels and accessories industry. Seeing as it is already well known, shoes produced by the company will garner a positive following and thus increase sales and customer base. This is because it is a one-stop shop where one can get all they need for sports, i.e., full apparel, accessories, and shoes.

Balanced Scorecard

As a management system, a balanced scorecard provides feedback on external and internal business processes to continuously improve strategic results and performance. Lululemon is on a path to producing more footwear to innovate the available products. A long-term value will be created between the brand, shareholders, and stakeholders through digital marketing and increasing the company’s customer base.

Lululemon company, through the balanced scorecard, can view itself from four perspectives which are internal business process, financial, customer perspective, and learning and growth (Manuel, 2022). Through the following actions, the company will be able to reach its digital marketing strategy based on the balanced scorecard strategy;

• Increase the overall income of the company
• Operation efficiency enhancement through overall internal business procedures and process improvement.
• Employee motivation promotion through development programs and training at the organization.
• High customer retention through the emphasis on customer perspective understanding.

Internal business

The systems and processes of an organization are related to internal business. To ensure that customer requirements and needs are met by strategy, measurement of the proposed marketing strategy’s success and performance will be done in this stage. Lululemon will calculate the cost of engagement for social marketing investment and mobile analysis (Manuel, 2022).

Learning and Growth

The success of a business is majorly dependent on its employees. The learning and growth of employees are crucial for the success of marketing the product, which creates a cause-effect relationship; training and development of employees will be conducted in this step. This will allow the avoidance of mediocrity and procrastination by employees. The productivity and performance of an organization increase when employees are well-informed about the marketing strategy. This step provides for information passing (Warokka, 2020).

Financial

Lululemon is required to increase its growth in North America and Europe through the marketing strategy proposed. Google Analytics will allow Lululemon to monitor the success of its marketing strategy worldwide. This is through analyzing metrics of people visiting the company’s website. The step will help lululemon as a brand to micromanage various aspects of the marketing strategy.in addition, it allows the brand to evaluate ROI and analyze its market competitiveness (Warokka, 2020).

Marketing Communication and Campaign

Lululemon will create a digital marketing plan that is effective in attracting customers. The main focus of the brand is to introduce comfortable and resistant footwear that favors all customers and the target market (Manuel, 2022). The brand aims at offering customers a one-stop-shop experience where they can acquire all their athletic needs, thus saving on time as well as some cost (Warokka, 2020).

To effectively integrate the digital marketing strategy and focus on the current marketing strategies, the brand will employ the RACE framework. The framework will allow the brand to maintain customer lifestyle relationships and increase product awareness throughout the customer base through digital marketing. RACE framework enables the development of a multi-channel approach, and this will help lululemon brand increase its customer base as well as current customer retention

Digital Marketing Communications Campaign

For the digital marketing strategy, the RACE framework is employed. The framework contains four marketing stages: Reach, Act, Converge, and Engage.

Reach

The first step for the digital marketing of athletic footwear produced by Lululemon is to generate exposure on the online platforms and the organization’s website. It is easy to measure the success of the marketing efforts as this step allows the brand to track the generated traffic by the campaigns on the social media and website pages (Rzemieniak, 2015). The target audience for this is mainly young men and women who are mostly in social media.

KPI’S

• Unique visitors to the company’s website
• Value per visit
• Number of social media followers

Act

Act depicts the interaction stage. At this point, the company interacts with the customers to get their reactions and view on the product. Lululemon will provide footwear that is valuable to the customers to capture their attention and encourage them to share the information with other people (Manuel, 2022). The brand can also know the quantity it should produce depending on the feedback collected. Collecting leads is the essential part of this step. The main purpose is to increase customers’ engagement through interacting with them. This is achieved by creating unique and engaging content for target customers (Rzemieniak, 2015). The brand will utilize this strategy.

KIP’s

• Leads
• Lead conversion rate
• Time on site/page
• Shares, comments, and likes

Covert

This step involves taking the collected leads and having them as paying customers. Essentially, it is turning all those who showed interest in the product into customers by encouraging them to buy it. This will be achieved by introducing policies that are customer friendly to gain their trust (Rzemieniak, 2015).

KIP.s

• Sales(online/offline)
• Profit/Revenue
• Average order
• Value

Engage

Every activity at this point aims to ensure a long-term relationship is developed between the brand and the customers. An essential thing as a company is to ensure that first-time buyers become regular customers of lululemon products. This can be achieved by initiating conversations through email or social media with the customers. The success of this step is measured by checking the occurrence of repeat purchases, positive brand mentions, and customer retention. Online advertising through bids and buying of third parties ad units will be used by lululemon to allow the brand to advertise the product through pop-up texts (Rzemieniak, 2015).

KPI’s

• Loyalty and Satisfaction
• Repeat purchase
• Advocacy

Impact assessment

Investors, employees, customers, suppliers, and members are the stakeholders of lululemon. All the internal or external stakeholders will be heavily impacted by the digital marketing strategy. The company’s HR department will be affected by the digital marketing strategy as it will have to focus on merging existing customers with new ones. The sales team is directly linked to the return on investment; thus, they are impacted by the strategy.

Conclusion

To ensure that an organization sticks to the marketing strategy, measuring and monitoring the tactic and strategic performance is very crucial. This allows the brand’s strength to increase through proper and effective allocation and directing of limited resources for implementing the marketing strategy. The balanced scorecard can be used to measure strategic performance, while strategic validation and operational decisions can be used to measure tactical performance.

Reference List

Macrotrends.net (no date) Lululemon Athletica Inc: Number of employees 2010-2022: Lulu, Macrotrends. Available at: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/LULU/lululemon-athletica-inc/number-of-employees (Accessed: November 26, 2022).

Manuel, L. (2022) 11.4 lululemon marketing strategy and plan, Global Marketing In a Digital World. Fanshawe College Pressbooks. Available at: https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/globalmarketing/chapter/11-4-lululemon-marketing-strategy-plan/ (Accessed: November 26, 2022).

Rzemieniak, M. (2015) “Measuring the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns inthe aspect of e-entrepreneurship,” Procedia Computer Science, 65, pp. 980–987. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2015.09.063.

Warokka, A. (2020) “Digital Marketing Support and Business Development Using Online Marketing Tools: An experimental analysis,” International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation, 24(1), pp. 1181–1188. Available at: https://doi.org/10.37200/ijpr/v24i1/pr200219.

Yahoo! Finance (2022) Lululemon Athletica Inc. (Lulu) Stock Price, news, Quote & History, Yahoo! Finance. Yahoo! Available at: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/LULU/ (Accessed: November 26, 2022).