Here’s why Photobox is transitioning its marketing practices

UK online retailer Photobox Group has seen 10 consecutive years of sales growth, made several acquisitions and moved into a  new £20 million London headquarters, as reported in the Drum. Despite the growth, however, the company isn’t resting, especially when it comes marketing.

According the article: “The personalized gifting company … recently underwent a “hard reset” of its marketing plans, led by head of brand Jo Lavender who joined from Pinterest – where she was brand and marketing lead in the UK – last year.”

The decision was prompted by the realization, while the company was very good at delivering personalized products, it was not competing well with “thoughtful gifting” lifestyle brands like Notonthehighstreet.com, Trouva.com, and Etsy.

“We’re a product business, a tech business and a retailer,” she said. “We’ve fine-tuned and reassessed what the customer experience is that we need to deliver across the end to end picture; from the creation to purchase, the product quality to the unboxing.”

The retooling resulted in an immediate uptick in brand awareness and consideration. Then, under new managing director Christian Woolfenden, the company selectively shut off marketing expenditures to determine what was effective and what wasn’t. Photobox also operates the Moonpig, Hofmann and PosterXXL brands.

“It was a really brave decision that’s allowed us to take an incredibly rigorous approach to understanding our marketing channel mix,” says Lavender. “[We’re] turned off one channel at a time to get a sense of what’s working and built it back in channel by channel, at the same time supporting that with the insight and positioning work from the brand.”

The end result created a playbook used by marketing agencies and media-buying teams to guide their decisions. Lavender said the goal is not to cut marketing spend, to deploy those resources more efficiently and effectively.

In other Photobox news, the company’s director of product innovation, Sally Foote, recently presented about innovation at Mind the Product conference. The video is below:

Maximum Possible Products by Sally Foote from Mind the Product on Vimeo.