The emerging post-Covid Travel Retail trend

The Moodie Davitt Report shows that Travel Retail is emerging as a strategic customer acquisition channel for brands and retailers. It is now invaluable not just because of the sales it generates but also because of the power it has to supercharge brands’ global digital marketing and loyalty campaigns.

According to Jason Scott-Lewis, GM/Greater China at CircleSquare, the role of the Travel Retail channel for brands is once again evolving, moving from its historical role as a physical high traffic ‘shop window’, to being a place where brands can implement strategies to acquire and onboard that traffic onto their digital platforms, to fuel their loyalty and wider marketing capabilities.

This is borne out by data showing a surprisingly high number of users reporting no prior familiarity with multiple ‘internationally renowned’ brands across multiple geographies. Typical ranges are 20 – 35% of users reporting first-time awareness of brands in North America and Western Europe, to very high levels in Hainan – where it can be in excess of 65%.

As expected, the traffic mix in the larger hubs is significantly diverse in terms of nationalities and destinations. The difference now is that digital acquisition affords Travel Retail brands the visibility they lacked prior to the pandemic. Digital customer acquisition is starting to generate data-sets for brands that are concrete in terms of quantitative visibility of their consumers – who they are, where they’re from, what they buy and when.