Lifestyle imaging doesn't always meet the discount need - Viewpoint - stores copying Target Corp. advertising - Brief Article - Column

DSN Retailing Today, March 25, 2002 by Tim Craig

Wouldn't it be nice, just once, to be a fly on the wall of a Madison Avenue think tank responsible for developing today's retail lifestyle advertisements. You can almost hear the sales pitch as they convince their clients to buy into their flashy, far-out campaigns. "Everybody's doing it," they'd say. "It's what's in. And if you want to be in--and who doesn't?--you need to do it, too."

As much as this type of pitch may sound absurd to outsiders, more and more retailers are jumping on the bandwagon. In the last 18 months alone, companies like Sears, Kmart and JCPenney, among others, have thrown their hats in the ring--as if they've come under the spell of a new generation of advertising associates schooled in the Calvin Klein-like method of conceptual marketing.

Yet in this mad rush to emulate the success of the Targets and Gaps of the world, many of today's retail campaigns are losing touch with reality. At times it seems they've forgotten everything they were ever told about price sensitivity and repetitive brand recognition--as though the only thing that ever mattered was mimicking the habits of one's target audience.

Maybe it's a trend that stems from industry pressure to keep up with the Joneses, a phenomenon otherwise known as department store envy, or worse yet from a deep sense of insecurity that the core discount message can't measure up in today's society. Either way, it seems that many in the retail community are abandoning the nuts-and-bolts marketing approach in exchange for a new breed of "softer," ethereal lifestyle ads that in many ways run contrary to the very nature of discount retailing.

This is, after all, an industry where commodity items reign supreme, and the process of conveying one's price position can be a make-or-break proposition. It's against this backdrop especially that this growing trend of "selling the image" at the exclusion of reinforcing the low-price merchandise seems all the more odd. Even the Target approach, which wins the highest of accolades from the advertising community each year, often leaves me scratching my head.

Here's a chain that spends top dollar each year on its glitzy campaigns, and yet when you visit its stores you still see the same core merchandise mix as many of its leading competitors. And still, its cutting-edge campaign keeps getting more creative each year, at times relying on just an image and a bulls-eye, while forgoing the Target name altogether.

Perhaps the secret to Target's success is they don't do things half way. Their ads are consistently so far out there that they've succeeded in hammering home an upscale image, even if that image isn't a true representation of the core Target shopper.

By comparison, many of the lifestyle campaigns by Target's contemporaries seem weak--and rightfully so. Not only can this approach serve to confuse the consumer, who's caught between a historically strong value message and this new message of a more upscale--read: "costlier"--environment, but it's created a saturation in the market for lifestyle ads. As a result, all of those in the middle ground, including many of the leading mass broadliners, are spending big bucks to get out a message that does little to advance their points of differentiation.

And here's the kicker. While many of these chains spin their wheels in a seemingly desperate effort to redefine their own self image, a tertiary level of deep discount retailers are taking their place as the destinations of choice for value-conscious consumers. Otherwise known as the extreme-value channel, this group includes such successful names as Dollar General, Fred's, 99 Cents Only and even Ames. And the message they're sending the discount consumer is exactly the one they want to hear. It speaks of affordability, selection and convenience--a message that undoubtedly resonates louder with the core discount shopper than even the most successful abstract campaigns.