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Kim Kardashian with Sir Michael Hill as the star prepares to promote the retailer via social networking platforms

New stores for Michael Hill; Kim Kardashian tweets

3.8 k views | Posted November 29, 2011 | By Aaron Weinman

Michael Hill International plans to open approximately 60 new stores worldwide as it experiments with novel digital marketing.

As the New Zealand-based jewellery chain prepares to bolster its portfolio of retail outlets, Michael Hill International (MHI) last year employed US “celebrity” Kim Kardashian to tweet in its favour.

With 243 stores across four countries, the New Zealand jeweller hopes to open approximately 15-20 new stores per year, over the next three to five years.

Company CEO, Mike Parsell told Jeweller that MHI will place the most emphasis on the Australian and Canadian markets expecting the bulk of the growth to come from there.

“The issue is getting the right locations,” Parsell said. “We are targeting around 15-20 a year, and over 3-5 years we hope to have 30-40 new stores in Australia alone.”

A total of 180 possible store locations have been identified across Australia, its primary market, while 100 sites have been earmarked in North America.

The news of store expansion comes after the retailer increased its revenues by 6.5 per cent in the first three-month trading period to September 30, 2011.

Meanwhile, in an effort to uplift its US stores, last year in the lead up to Christmas MHI used reality TV star Kim Kardashian in a social media marketing campaign. Rather than utilise the star in television commercials, the retailer paid Kardashian to promote its brand via Twitter.

As reported by Fairfax Media, Australian celebrity agent Max Markson brokered a deal for an undisclosed fee between MHI and Kardashian, whereby the latter had to mention Michael Hill in a series of posts on both Facebook and Twitter between October and December 2010.

“At that stage, Kim had over six million Twitter followers and 2 million fans on Facebook,” Markson said. “As part of the contract, we wrote some of the tweets and with that, the contract was fulfilled.”

Parsell added that the campaign with Kardashian was a great success and had increased awareness of the company in the US market, where it’s still an emerging jeweller.

“We got a lot of measurement on social media scales and wouldn’t have got the global cut through the [US] market if we didn’t have her [Kardashian],” Parsell said. “We are considering how we move forward and build social media into our business.”

Social media plays an important factor in the marketing of any brand in today’s advanced world and two-way communication platforms like Twitter and Facebook are an integral part of connecting with end consumers. Parsell said Kardashian’s tweets provided an accurate yardstick for measuring the awareness of the retailer and believes the modest investment was a small price to pay for invaluable tweets.

“It was very significant for our brand in the USA,” Parsell said. “Her tweets are valuable and our media wall sits behind Kim because the images of her [wearing the retailer’s products] were blown all over the globe.”

Although Markson won’t disclose Kardashian’s fee, other celebrities including actress Lindsay Lohan and musician Snoop Dogg are reported to have requested $10,000 a tweet. According to Markson, Twitter and Facebook play a large part of contracts today.

While social media marketing is in its infancy, some companies refuse to pay ambassadors for tweets, in the belief that they can be misconstrued as disingenuous. Comparisons have been drawn to the ‘cash for comment’ scandal in 1999, where banks and other companies paid radio hosts John Laws and Alan Jones for favourable coverage.

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