During December we worked closely with our client LCP Consulting, a BearingPoint company, on developing a story to promote its Christmas online shopping returns data for 2017/2018.

The data showed that the continued surge in online shopping would see over £2.5 billion of unwanted Christmas presents returned to UK retailers this year, with the majority returned between mid-December (following Black Friday) and mid-January.

Our strategy involved embargoing the story, and exclusively selling it into the Daily Telegraph pre-Christmas, and then issuing the story more widely on the morning of the Telegraph piece to amplify it across national, retail and logistics press.

This strategy proved successful with 16 press hits during the first week of 2018, including pieces in The Telegraph, BBC News Online, The i newspaper, Drapers, Retail Times, Edelivery and Logistics Manager.

Stuart Higgins, Director – Retail, at LCP Consulting, a BearingPoint company, said in the official press release and in many of the articles:

“The price retailers have to pay for online growth is pretty substantial. Not only will this flood of returns put additional demands on retailers back-end operations during their busiest online sales week of the year, it will also impact their stores as a third of returns will come back into stores just as they’re launching their Christmas and January sales.”