“If we focus a little bit more on the search data side, it’s not just about the obvious trends. … Consumers were still interested in purchasing luxury items for themselves and others. From a business sense, we’ve all been living on video calls for the last 13 months, potentially more. And there’s a great focus people have on homeware – making renovations and improvements to our video call backdrops.
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
“You’ve then got a demand in shirts, blouses, caps, eyewear – essentially, anything above the waist that’s in view. We could see how people were reacting there.”
Cartlidge illustrated how data from search allowed Farfetch to keep abreast of these overarching trends, as well as other, briefer (but no less commercially viable) surges in demand and adapt the products it stocked and marketed accordingly.
“It’s not just about the data that’s building to prominence – it’s the surge, or the bursting trends in buying behaviour. Last year was a great example with Air Jordans: when the ‘Last Dance’ biography about Michael Jordan ran on Netflix, from the moment the first programme went live, the surge globally was like a wave – but because we saw the data coming, we were able to react very, very quickly not only [in] how we merchandised the prominence [of these products] and the investment, but also to talk to our global boutique partners about the trends that we were seeing, to help potentially influence the stock that they were picking and putting on the platform.”
Customer data can also be used in a much more granular way to zero in on the audiences who will be most receptive to a particular product or service. Gareth Jones, CMO at Farfetch, explained how the luxury retailer has been able to apply customer data to traditionally “mass media” advertising channels, thus targeting the most receptive customers with their message.