Uniqlo Digital Marketing

Domino's Mini Site / Landing Page

So, we put a special mini site together for the campaign which all our online promotion (targetted newsletters, social media PR and artist site news stories) funnelled into.

Before we set about designing the campaign as such I wanted to make sure we were clear about our goals. 

1. Promote The Music / Domino

We knew there were likely to be 3 different kinds of customers buying a t-shirt.

a) Customers who were going to simply buy a t-shirt just as a cool item of clothing.

b) Customers would buy a t-shirt and be curious about the music. 
They might be a lapsed Domino music fans (a number were older artists) or just curious as to what the design meant. We wanted to engage with them on a promo level for those artists / Domino and do some kind of data capture for those willing to be more engaged.

c) Customers already evangelical about Domino / the band 
These fans would be excited to see them in a store. The designs are reworkings of classic and cult artwork and they'd want to share the news with their friends with something interesting.

Ideally we would have loved to have had a digital code on the label and linked it all up like that. Its something we've done before but alas I came in a bit too late re: production schedule so we had to go with an old fashioned postcard pointing to a mini site showcasing the artists and t-shirts. The postcards went to all the stores globally to be given out at the till. 

The mini site gave people the option to download a free sampler with or without sign up.

AND on top of that. Just try reposting the link to the mini site in facebook. See what happens. Yup, we put together this lovely "This Is What Your T-Shirt Sounds Like" widget, which you can read more about here.

2. Promote The Campaign As A Whole

Record labels rarely do this kind of thing. We wanted to show to band managers and other people in the industry that we were able to do this really great thing. We wanted people to sit up and take notice.

But cozying up to a big fashion brand is an odd thing. We didn't want to do it in a corporate way. We wanted to make a splash and show off but in an interesting way. This is where the idea of putting people from the office into the campaign and replicating the style of the typical Uniqlo ads came in. At the same time we knew that a lot of our artists were fans of other artists on the label. So we asked bands when they came into the office if they wanted to get involved. I made sure they were put alongside people from the office in the final composites again to give it that guerilla feel whilst getting the press interested enough to use the photos.

3. Lo Cost / Self Fund The Campaign

I'd been playing around with affiliate schemes for a while. And well.. this seemed like a great opportunity to fund the design / time we spent through Uniqlo's linkshare programme. The aim was not to create vast revenues (which seeing as we were taking people on a detour through some music was not likely anyway!) but funnelling anyone who wanted to buy a(nother) tee through to Uniqlo via an affiliate link seemed like a good idea. So I set up an affiliate account with linkshare and we put all the relevant links into the website. And then..

And then.. I started to get some canny ideas... Talking to the people at Uniqlo and Linkshare I started to realise how many blogs out there were sending people through linkshare links onto the Uniqlo site. But, Uniqlo didn't have any interesting affiliated widgets or gizmos to offer their bloggers on this new UT collection. So.. if we offered them something from us we were pretty much guaranteed that any presence for the UT campaign would feature our tees.. All we had to do was co-ordinate with linkshare to give them something they could offer out.

I supplied them with a ton of ads they could use in this way and they were prominently featured in the linkshare mail out to all their affiliates about the campaign. Sweet.

4. Keep Uniqlo Happy / Make As Much Noise As Possible

So, we realised that usually with the UT campaign the artist / designer involvement really ends at the.. umm design stage. But I'd already got some stats on their mailing list that were pretty impressive. Of course they would give the campaign some noise in their standard emails but I had an eye on their social media presence which was only just starting to be managed. Give them some sexy tools and we would have a much bigger impact than just a model in a Domino t-shirt in a mailing. 

The holy grail was their facebook page. It had 40k+ members. Of course we did shout outs with the widget to our facebook and twitter accounts and various bands joined in too but getting Uniqlo to do likewise was pretty sweet. And they were really excited about it. We had tons of viral action as a consequence.

Finally, we did a couple of instores in their Oxford Street store. I put together a ton of Domino sweet bags with the postcards with free cds, promo goodies and the postcards and we had Domino people and artists DJing. Uniqlo were very pleased.