How Patagonia keeps its audience engaged and outside
Patagonia was built on content. Since its launch the outdoor brand has been one of the pioneers of integrating editorial and merchandising content into its go to market approach. In its early days this was driven by a necessity to show their products in action, but it quickly became a staple of how they communicated with their customers. Now Patagonia creates content across a wide variety of platforms to both communicate the value of its products to consumers, but also to get its environmental mission across.
Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard understood the power of his customers seeing their product in use, but he also understood the impact of inspiration. The more Patagonia customers were inspired to go and do the things they loved the more they were likely to need his products. It’s this insight that ultimately led to the brand delivering an engagement based approach to content marketing. Where many other brands relationship with the customer ended at point of sale, Patagonia continued to engage them with content around their passions. Fast forward to the present day and that still holds true.
What started as a way to create content in catalogues has turned into a full content marketing ecosystem. Browse the Patagonia site and you’ll find sections dedicated to each relevant sport, with product and stories side by side. Merchandising articles, that connect the value of the product to the users interests, make up the bulk of the material in the ecomm environment. Each provides value to the target audience whilst delivering on business goals.
This is then reused across Patagonia’s channels, particularly in CRM. Inspiring content offers a value exchange to their potential audience and current customers. It creates a reason for a value based communication from the brand beyond that of product message or promotion.
A key to the success of the stories themselves is that it are specifically designed for the target audience, whether that’s surf, climb, ski or fishing amongst others. But also that for the most part each is ‘evergreen’, which means it is not necessarily tied to any point in time. This approach enables the brand to leverage it across any channel at any point to drive a deeper engagement with their users and customers.
Whilst Patagonia ensures a substantial amount of content connects back to its products, it also invests in delivering its mission through long form storytelling designed to engage a wider audience about environmental issues. Films such as Jumbo Wild, are distributed on third party platforms such as Netflix and Youtube to extend their reach.
THE TAKEAWAY
Create Editorial and Merchandising content to drive engagement
Where possible ensure content is evergreen
Establish a Content Positioning that delivers on your brand strategy
Power your CRM channels with value based Editorial and Merchandising content
Leverage your content across external channels to drive wider reach
GO DEEPER
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