LONG LASTING RVIEWS

Background: In 2018, Darty’s CEO Enrique Martinez decided to put sustainability at the core of the company strategy and not just as something nice to say. A strategy that aims to fight against overconsumption, obsolescence and ressources exhaustion, by offering people solutions to increase the longevity of their products at every step of their lifecyle, even if it means selling less. That’s why this strategy led Darty to shift it business model, in order to keep growing by finding value beyond sales. But you may have the vision and the tools, it’s useless as long as people don’t embrace it. At the end, the power and so the change belong to all of us, as consumers and that’s why the objective was nothing more than onboarding them on Darty’s journey. Creative Idea: Let’s be fair, it’s a simple idea that looks like quite obvious once you have the problem in mind. However, it has never been done before. It’s about changing the rules of reviews to ensure that we let time take its course, by asking people to share their feedback after more than one year of use. Simple, but powerful to change habits without changing habits. Simple, but powerful to reframe the way we assign value to things. Simple, but powerful to help people make choices through the lens of long-term. Simple, but powerful to instill this new mindset at the core of the commerce machine. Insights & Strategy: We were thinking about how can we help people to make their choices through the lens of long-term, beyond just inviting them to do it through advertising. So we dig into the understanding of how we make our purchasing choices and we’ve discovered that consumers reviews are now by far the most influential force (87% of consumers say that customer reviews are the primary source of influence on their purchasing decisions / source: Harris Interactive 2023). But there was a strong bias, because reviews are stuck in the short-term as well, as 77% of people write their review within a week of receiving or using the product (source: PowerReviews 2021). This means we are likely to be influenced by reviews that can be misleading, especially when it comes to categories where the real value needs time to be judged, such as home appliances. Execution: Let’s be fair, it’s a simple idea that looks like quite obvious once you have the problem in mind. However, it has never been done before. It’s about changing the rules of reviews to ensure that we let time take its course, by asking people to share their feedback after more than one year of use. Simple, but powerful to change habits without changing habits. Simple, but powerful to reframe the way we assign value to things. Simple, but powerful to help people make choices through the lens of long-term. Simple, but powerful to instill this new mindset at the core of the commerce machine. Results: First, the launching advertising campaign on the “Let’s make it last” has delivered strong results : • A trustworthy brand: +23 points • A leading brand: +17 points • A brand that offers products with good value for money: +19 points • A brand I feel connected to: +23 points • Desire to learn more about the brand: +18 points • Desire to recommend the brand: +26 points • Desire to purchase products offered by Darty: +21 points Then, when it comes to the long-lasting reviews, the ambition was to push the initiative to our consumers (to date 3 845 663 consumers have been reached, for 18 225 products to be reviewed) but also to anchor it at an industry level. And we worked in collaboration with l’Ademe (the French Governmental Agency for Ecological Transition).