eCommerce 2.0: Levi’s, Lego and Why You Wish You Had their Brands

Any session with Geoff Ramsey is guaranteed to be a fact-fest. Today, as moderator of the eCommerce 2.0 session, he did not disappoint. Here are a few from the first five minutes of the session:

• 92% of adults regularly go online when considering a purchase
  
• online search influences 20-30% of offline purchases
  
• 78% of internet users in America shop online
  
• 50% of online adults watch video on YouTube
  
• video adspend for 2006 was $410 million out of $16 billion in total adspend, but is expected to grow to $2.9 billion by 2010
  
• there are 72 million blogs online, but only 7-10% of Internet users are active blog readers
  
• MySpace has 60 million users
  
• Google’s Eric Schmidt said “We are in the worldwide advertising market.” A 600 billion dollar market
  
• 25% of online visitors go to social media sites

Ramsey moderated a panel with Finlay Robb, Chief Marketing Officer of Lego Direct 2 Consumer, and Patrice Varni, Director of Internet Marketing and Online Business at Levi Strauss & Co.

Both Levi Strauss and Lego have extremely well known, and well liked brands. The challenge for Varni and Robb has been how to build on this affinity in ways that build trust and higher levels of engagement with their customers. And both were very forthcoming with their respective company’s efforts to do just that.

Lego has created an online portal to Lego products that is now the 3rd largest kids site in the world. Much of what they’ve done with their site has been directly in response to feedback from visitors - “they told us what they wanted from the site.” Robb characterized their efforts online as a process of learning what they can do to support their large enthusiast community.

One interesting thing that Lego does is identify certain individuals from the community and officially sanction them to speak on behalf of Lego. They give them advanced notice of product announcements and help these individuals build their reputation online. They also host some sites for people who are major lego enthusiasts.

At Levi Strauss they’ve debated how much control over their brand to give over to consumers. For instance, they’ve determined to include consumer product reviews on their site despite the risk of negative responses. For them, the risk is worth the tremendous amount they will learn about their products and their consumers. Varni said one thing that has been successful for them was shooting video specifically for online use, rather than repurposing offline ads. Also, they’ve found that behavioral targetting of media to consumers who’ve previously visited their sites worked very well, but that they have not gone as far as they could with this tactic because of potentially violating their consumer’s privacy.

As a partner in an interactive agency myself, I was happy to hear that the Lego search marketing campaign really took off two years ago when they outsourced the task to an outside group. They now attribute 16% of their sales to this program.

For both Levi Strauss and Lego, the emphasis seems to be not how to roll out the next homerun campaign, but rather to keep from overreaching and in some way harming their customers’ already strong affinity for their Brands. We should all be so lucky.