Retail reality – How Myer Compares Across Social Content, Audience and Care

Myer is one of the most well known Australian brands, having opened the first Myer store in Bendigo, Victoria in 1900. After prospering, the second store opened in 1908, and in 1911 Sidney Myer and his brother hit Melbourne city. Myer has been an iconic department store brand ever since. Right now, Myer is on life support with its share price dropping by 80% over the last 8 years. To add insult to injury, on March 9, 2108, Myer was relegated from the S&P/ASX 200 Index which by necessity will cause a flood of exits by funds and investment houses.

With all the gloom about we were interested to see how Myer compared in social content, social care and social audience to various peers. Luckily the Sprinklr Business Index provides us with those comparisons.

David Jones gets more love but Myer gives better social service

David Jones has long been Myer’s key competitor, often battling each other from opposing blocks on the one street. Although David Jones lays claim to being more upmarket, and Myer to being better value, the foot traffic often flows out of one store and into the other.

In social, they have remarkably similar profiles, as show in the comparative social content insights below.  Unfortunately David Jones is also suffering financially at the moment, so perhaps being as good as each other is not being good enough.

In fact the Brand Score of Myer and David Jones across social content, audience and social care is exactly the same – 6.8. Amazingly they also have the same Engagement Ratio of 0.68% (not shown).

Digging deeper, we can see that the components of the combined brand score of 6.8 are made up differently between the two – David Jones has stronger performance in content, and Myer has better social customer care. Perhaps they could swap best practice and both come out on top?

David Jones scores 73% on the generic topic of “love” whereas Myer has topics which reflect customer needs and concerns such as “dress” and “staff”. However, as explained in the next section, while Myer scores better than David Jones on customer care it still compares poorly to an online leader.

Compared to Kogan, Myer fails on social care

If we take a new online business – Kogan – and compare to Myer it will give us an idea of how a top-performing digital brand sets the pace, and what the gap is to a traditional department store.

Kogan was founded in 2006 in the garage of the founder Ruslan Kogan who is renown for saying that Kogan.com.au is “a stats business masquerading as a retailer”. Kogan listed about 12 months ago and now has two online stores (Kogan.com.au and DickSmith.com.au) and has a market cap $660m and rising compared to Myer’s market cap on 2 March 2018 of just $370m despite Myer having more than 67 retail locations and 14,000 employees.

Sure enough, although Kogan’s overall brand score is far lower that Myer it is clear that Kogan focuses their social media on one specific aspect and excels. That aspect is social customer care, where Myer scores 6.8 and Kogan 8.5.

It is a massive leap from a score of 6.8 to one of 8.5, requiring processes and systems which have eluded many big consumer-oriented companies in Australia. This is where Sprinklr itself excels. The stand-out figure for Kogan is not the average response time of 7 hours, which is the same as Myer, but that they respond to 36% of social media messages. That’s huge. For a department store looking to build their online sales and services Kogan provides a perfect case study.

Bridging the gap to best of breed – Selfridges

Comparing Myer to a top performing and roughly equivalent global brand gives an idea of the gap to be spanned in social for Myer.

Selfridges rates a Brand Score of 8.3, a considerable leap and a massive effort to achieve from a score of 6.8. Looking at the brand score radar it is obvious that Selfridges fills out the capabilities in all three segments, a very compelling visual comparison to the current capabilities of Myer.

What also stands out is the number of engagements per day and the number of engagements per post for Selfridges, compared to Myer – both superior.

Taking a deeper dive into what works for Selfridges, we can see that, like David Jones, they get a lot more love in the conversations from their clients in social media – 68% for Selfridges and 42% for Myer.

And finally, if we compare Social Care we see an amazing statistic – that over the last 30 days (up to 8th March 2018) Selfridges’ average response time on social media was an astounding 44 minutes. To achieve that takes very effective systems and platforms and integration across the enterprise and social systems.

And for all that Selfridges is only ranked 80th in the global rankings for social care! This emphasises the effort required by Myer to improve, and the tremendous opportunity. It is in these circumstances that the real purpose of “digital transformation” becomes apparent.

If you would like to have your own organisation benchmarked, or discuss strategies and operational tactics to improve your performance across social content, audience and care, then please contact us.