Asos marketing boss has spoken about the challenges of ensuring the online fashion retailer is always at the “forefront of customers’ minds” as he looks to steer the brand back towards profitability.
Dan Elton joined Asos as executive vice-president of customer in March 2023, coming into the business to help head up the brand’s much-needed transformation plan as it plunged to a near-£300m full-year loss last year.
Talking on the This Much I Learned podcast, Elton revealed that the over-reliance on promotions was due to needing to clear excess stock which had built up due to “expectations of growth continuing coming out of the pandemic”.
“We needed to clear that stock and we’ve been promoting to do so. But it’s not the direction we want to take the business in the future.”
The ecommerce brand had grown particularly fast throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, but sales started to fall away soon afterwards, as shoppers returned to physical stores and the cost-of-living crisis began to take hold.
The fashion retailer has admitted its emphasis on cost-cutting in a bid to redress some of that balance has seen it lose customers over the past year, while CEO José Antonio Ramos Calamonte has also attributed the dip in profits to placing too much focus on price cuts and sales promotions.
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As part of the brand-building transformation, Elton commissioned some research when he first joined Asos. It revealed that while consumers loved the retailer, they also felt it wasn’t part of their daily lives in the way other fashion brands were.
The lack of consumer interaction was noted, with shoppers saying they simply didn’t “hear from [the brand] anymore”.
At the time, Asos didn’t even have official influencers – something Elton has been quick to change, with the recently relaunched Asos Insider Influencer programme taking centre stage. The initiative feeds neatly into the updated marketing strategy, which focuses on reigniting Asos ‘brand heat’ and reminding customers of its fashion credentials.
“One of the first things we had to do was really rebuild that muscle and start putting Asos back at the forefront of customers’ minds,” Elton said.
When he joined Asos over a year ago, around 85% of all marketing spend was directed towards Google search and Facebook/Instagram advertising. That has changed now, as the brand looks to balance its spend more evenly between brand affinity and performance marketing.
“[How we used to work] was appropriate at a time when all we had to do was show up at the last stage of the purchase journey to win the conversion,” Elton said.
“Because it was a bit less competitive, there was a lot more demand. But that isn’t true anymore.”
