UNIQLO case study

Bringing a Japanese mix of fashionable functionality to the British High Street

Brief Unification

Stylishly vivid and unwaveringly dedicated to quality, Japanese fashion house UNIQLO has been bringing its blend of material innovations and variety of colour to the London high street since 2001. Over the intervening eight years, UNIQLO has launched a total of fourteen stores throughout London, along with an ecommerce website that has enabled it to have a shop front for the whole of the UK. The company’s presence here has been growing steadily year on year, but it has always been eclipsed by the unassailable dominance of the brand in its home country of Japan. However, with another exciting year planned for 2010 and a recent boom in online traffic and revenues, it won’t be long before UNIQLO is a household name throughout the whole of the UK in the same way that it is on the other side of the world.

UNIQLO takes a lot of pleasure in producing beautifully designed and durable clothing and nowhere is that more evident than in its new +J range. Created by the designer Jil Sander, the +J collection embodies UNIQLO’s bold stance on fashion; purity in design, beauty and comfort for all. This brand ethos can also be seen in its 2009 winter warming HeatTech range that blends high tech fabrics to keep you warm throughout the cold stretch with stylish designs.

4Ps Marketing has been working with UNIQLO since May 2009 to help it to maximise its natural search engine traffic. After just five months of the strategy being implemented, UNIQLO has developed a 93% increase in natural search engine traffic thanks to a series of incremental ranking position jumps for key search terms. This has translated into a subsequent 289% increase in revenue directly attributable to non-paid search engine traffic.

As with everything to do with fashion, reinvention is the norm and new designs are the key. With visitor figures at a plateau throughout the months leading up to May 2009, 4Ps Marketing needed to bring UNIQLO’s own style and form brand values to its search engine optimisation strategy if it was to make a dent in the highly competitive and visually oriented retail clothing industry.

United Strategy

The fashion world is filled with competitors vying for public attention and all working overtime to reach the heady heights of the top ten ranking page in the most effective search engines. Massive high street brands like Topshop and Next rub shoulders with online aficionados like Asos and Boohoo. Niche brands eat up space with dedicated domain names like skinnyjeans.com and new entrants to the marketplace flash on and off the top search terms within the blink of an eye.

With new product ranges coming and going with the change of the seasons, one of the key challenges for 4Ps Marketing was establishing a sense of stability for the website to ensure that it could establish itself in the highly competitive realms of fashion search engine ranking pages. Cyclical or seasonal changes affect online clothing sales in the same way that they do high street stores and so getting a feeling for the natural ups and down of the marketplace was important to mitigate the troughs and push up the natural peaks in traffic.

Working closely with UNIQLO, 4Ps Marketing also needed to create a natural search campaign that encompassed the companies brand values, incorporating them into the tone of voice adopted in onsite optimisation. This would help to ensure that a consistent and well worded communication strategy was adopted across the board. It was also important to take into account the necessity for imagery to feature heavily on the site.

With ambitious targets to increase site traffic without having a negative effect on bounce rates or the time consumers spent on site, 4Ps Marketing had a task on its hands. This was coupled with the requirement to translate the increases in site traffic into direct return on investment in the form of natural search traffic revenue.

e-Commerce Manager at UNIQLO UK Ltd. comments:

“PPC and SEO has proved to be a vital part of the marketing mix for UNIQLO and 4Ps has spearheaded a new and forward thinking approach. Working in tandem we have achieved a cohesive and integrated approach to online marketing which has resulted in improved average order values and conversion.”

Uniquivocal Execution

In May 2009 4Ps Marketing undertook a thorough site analysis for UNIQLO to gain a complete understanding of the site’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as looking at the site’s main competitors to evaluate opportunities available to the online store, whilst identifying the core threats to future success. In a market like the clothing industry, a website that stands still or adopts only an introspective outlook will be quickly overtaken by ambitious competitors.

Working closely with the team at UNIQLO, 4Ps Marketing translated the important site and competitor analysis into a strategy that was as fast moving and ready to adopt new technology as UNIQLO itself.

4Ps Marketing’s strategy focused on a forward looking plan taking into account UNIQLO’s future product launches and seasonal campaigns, setting changes in motion before the launches to ensure that time and indexing was maximised. This ensured that the natural search engine optimisation implementation was ahead of the game and not simply reacting to changes as and when they occurred.

Perhaps the biggest element of the strategy was to work towards a successful Christmas period. Preparing for the online Christmas shopping rush that begins in the latter half of November was paramount. Gaining increases in ranking in the build up to this period was crucial to ensure that UNIQLO maximises its online leverage of this short window of intense shopping. With only fourteen stores, all based in London and an offline marketing strategy that focused on the London area, 4Ps Marketing needed to increase brand awareness outside of the London area if it was to generate the increases to visitor traffic and natural search engine generated revenue that it had set its sights on.

Consequently, as well as building up additional presence on search engine ranking pages through site optimisation, 4Ps Marketing also developed a social media plan that would help to improve UNIQLO’s national reach as well as complimenting the search engine optimisation of the site.

Adopting 4Ps Marketing’s social media optimisation plan (SMO) plan and optimisation recommendations where possible, UNIQLO went from having a London centric customer base to having a national online shop front that was driving traffic and sales from all over the UK.

4Ps Marketing Account Director, Matthew Phelan commented: “The potential for UNIQLO was apparent early on and we wanted to help them tap into this within very short timeframes. UNIQLO has been great at listening to our recommendations, and the online team’s eagerness for site improvement and adoption of new communication mechanisms like Twitter have been key to our combined success. By working together we have been able to achieve results that we are all very proud of.”

Unique Results

The strength of the strategy has become increasingly apparent in the build up to the Christmas period. With an increasing number of search terms featuring highly in search engine ranking pages, including a significant number of important terms in the number 1 spot, UNIQLO gained ground on its competitors within a very short period of time.
As more and more keywords started to appear in search engine ranking pages throughout August and September, UNIQLO’s visitor figures started to respond dramatically.

In addition to developing search engine optimisation benefits, 4Ps Marketing’s link building strategy also benefitted UNIQLO’s visitor traffic through referral site links, with visitor figures from referral traffic increasing by 106% from May to October 2009.

In addition to the uninterrupted increases in revenue and visitor figures, UNIQLO also experienced a significant increase in average order value indicating that the quality of the traffic had also improved over the time period.

With visitor figures, revenue, quality of visitors and search engine ranking positions all at a record high, UNIQLO is now well placed to perform well above expectations for the lucrative winter shopping rush. In a marketplace as competitive as the fashion industry, the improvements that UNIQLO has experienced are pretty unique, but for a company like UNIQLO standing out from the crowd is the norm.

Matthew Phelan, Account Director at 4Ps Marketing comments: “The online growth of UNIQLO’s search engine results has been very exciting for us at 4Ps Marketing. Seeing all of the hard work pay off so well is a big achievement for the Search Engine Optimisation team. Within a short space of time they’ve created a very effective strategy that has delivered impressive results across the board”.

UNIQLO’s e-Commerce Manager comments: “The work that 4Ps Marketing has done to prepare for our key trading periods has ensured that UNIQLO continue to have a strong presence within paid and organic search results.”

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