Venus

Creating a brand strategy for Venus to drive growth

Challenge

Fashion & apparel retail is one of the toughest markets to succeed in.

The landscape today is incredibly fast-moving – from style trends to a constant influx of new competitors and business models to consumers who jump on new trends on TikTok faster than brands can react.

Brands in this category must have a clear brand strategy in place to stay top of mind and relevant.

Recently acquired by BonPrix, Venus wanted to create a brand strategy that would underpin the growth they needed in order to achieve aggressive performance goals for 2020.

After years of volatility, the brand had started moving forward in a positive direction, but they were uncertain about who to target and what their positioning should be in a hugely competitive market.

Clarity

It was clear that Venus needed to define and size their achievable market and identify the strongest brand positioning that would resonate with these target consumers.

At the same time, they had to ensure that the new brand strategy wouldn’t alienate the loyal consumer base they had worked so hard to build.

We started by working with a cross-functional group led by the Executive team to gain a really strong understanding of the business vision.

Using our Growth Map process, we built a total fashion category segmentation.

By understanding the barriers, drivers, attitudes and behaviors that exist in the category, we could not only identify where to win, but also size the opportunity.

This process also highlighted key competitive and white spaces for the Venus brand to occupy.

Finally, the dynamic learning that we uncovered also gave us critical insight into how to profile and target these people in Venus’ consumer database.

A total brand strategy, identity and customer experience transformation

Solution

With a clear understanding fo the customer needs, we then we moved into a brand strategy and positioning exercise to find a clear, unique, differentiated and relevant strategy for the Venus brand.

A brand strategy that would give them enough flexibility and adaptability to move with the ever-changing fashion market and grow into over time.

In order to keep the consumer continuously involved in this iterative approach, we then took positioning concepts and territories out to the target consumer and existing Venus consumers.

A clear winner emerged from that process – a unique and differentiated brand positioning that set Venus apart in a very crowded and competitive market.

Impact

Finally, our design and strategy team worked hand in hand to produce a final, dynamic brand positioning and identity guideline for the Venus team to implement into their everyday work.

The design strategy really sought to transform the look and feel of the Venus brand across all moments of the experience.

The result was a total brand strategy, identity and customer experience transformation.

Our work with Venus contributed to an increase in revenues for parent group Bonprix of 3.4% in 2018/19 – all the more impressive in a fashion retail segment under significant pressure.

Venus has underpinned a strong recovery for the Bonprix group post-pandemic with 17% year on year growth in 2021 after a single digit percentage drop in sales in 2020.