One of the most popular approaches to content marketing for the festive season is gift lists. This works best if your company or business has a really distinctive brand identity or customer audience. In those circumstances, your product curation will provide real value by hooking into the particular likes and dislikes which your customers expect from the brand.
Examples of gift lists
John Lewis and Wiggle both have good examples of a value-added gift list. John Lewis web users value the ability of the retailer to pick out the classy, high-quality, on-trend products with a distinctively British flavour. Style is important here.
Wiggle, on the other hand, uses a short quiz to drill down to appropriate products – especially helpful for family and friends buying for a sporting enthusiast, where they might not share the hobby.
Influencer Gift Lists
The most notable influencer gift list is Oprah’s Favourite Things, which, by coincidence, happens to feature a product from one of my company’s clients:
Other examples of product curation
Another approach to the product curation offering of strong brands is coverage of the shop windows and Christmas adverts. Fenwick’s pick up substantial coverage of their Christmas window displays. This represents a good opportunity for extra content marketing around a product-heavy event in a unique and on-brand way.
Similarly Christmas TV adverts generate online discussion and provide off-site links and coverage in a way which complements the brand and brings customers to the online store for ideas and brand-sensitive suggestions.
Why product curation matters
On the modern web, product display and distribution is becoming more and more standardized. Services such as Google shopping and the Amazon marketplace have set expectations for product display, pricing display, and have set worldwide shipping and transactional email expectations.
In this standardized environment, retailers have to compete on other fronts to find an edge.
Encouraging users to start with a trusted brand, rather than an individual product search is an example of where retailers can win out. In these circumstances, retailers shine by providing product curation complete with unique photography, videos and styling ideas. They connect with their target market and focus on a stylized experience.
On the modern web, retailers are well placed to tell us what to buy and why, through trusted product curation.
Get a gift list for Christmas
Hire me to create your on-brand gift list and product curation content in time for Christmas.