ABOUT

STRATEGY
With 14m unique visitors a year, Play was one of the UK’s top online retailers.

To differentiate it from competitors like eBay and Amazon, the branding was transitioning to a more sophisticated, department store style. New categories were introduced, expanding out from the original core offerings of DVDs, Blu-rays, music and games.

This required a complete site redesign, to meet the different commercial needs of all the product categories, stores and campaign pages onsite. Commercially, it needed to be launched well in advance of the seasonal run up to Christmas.



EXECUTION
The new branding was conceived to feel bright, clean, contemporary and above all to maintain its integrity in the fast-moving production environment without dilution over time, ensuring consistency of user experience and brand engagement. With the introduction of a new CMS, content needed to be remain modular and flexible.

We carried out careful analysis of the user journey from first touch through to purchase, identifying key areas and calls to action for each category.

From this, the site homepage, campaign pages and key pages for the categories were created, along with a detailed set of brand guidelines and usage guidelines for each department.

The brand typeface adopted had a broad range of weights, allowing the design to remain consistent across the site while remaining flexible enough to vary styles between categories.

The concept was also applied to all other channels - email, social media and ATL marketing.

The new site clearly differentiated Play from its competitors by a very consistent, engaging and fresh approach to high volume e-commerce marketing.

In the period after its launch, page views per visit increased, the bounce rate decreased across key areas and customers found their way through to deeper level pages via fewer clicks.

The first major test for the flexibility of the redesign came in Q4 - and the creative translated beautifully to a bright, high impact Christmas campaign right across the site, on email and online advertising. It successfully enticed and converted customers over this key trading period, the first Christmas following the company's takeover by the Rakuten Group.