Bastion Collective is expanding with its new arm, Bastion Retail, specialising in retail strategy and marketing.

Bastion Retail exists to help retailers and brands navigate through what is clearly a difficult and challenging time by creating new ways to attract, engage and retain consumers, with a harmonised approach to the physical and digital world.

Bastion Collective’s local chief executive, Jack Watts said: “We exist to help our clients create, grow, measure and protect ideas. Growth for our clients often involves driving sales both online and in-store.

“As such, it is pivotal that the campaigns we run for a client translates all the way through to the point of sale.”

Watts added: “As one of the only truly integrated communications agencies, we focus on working with our clients to articulate one unifying idea, delivered consistently, yet bespoke across every applicable channel.

“Seeing things through to the retail environment, both e-commerce and bricks and mortar is pivotal to delivering a holistic communications approach and driving sales for our clients.

“This is why we jumped at the opportunity to partner with Marcus and create Bastion Retail.

“I am incredibly confident Marcus’s 20+ years of retail experience will help our clients grow their businesses.”

Australia has 180,000 listed bricks and mortar retailers, representing 4.1 per cent of GDP and 10.7 per cent of the nation’s employment.

Research by Salesforce reveals more than 53 per cent of consumers preferred bricks and mortar stores because they can physically experience the item before purchasing.

Bastion Retail is headed up by Marcus Millgate, with over 20 years of retail marketing and advertising experience working with WPP’s major clients at Grey Advertising, Ogilvy Worldwide, and Geometry Global.

Millgate’s career has taken him to many corners of the globe, with senior agency appointments in London, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney and most recently Seoul.

Millgate will work with Bastion’s clients, and complementary agencies, on retail marketing including shopper engagement, customer journey mapping, e-commerce strategy and development, trade promotion, packaging design; along with retail transformation and retail technology including voice AI and shop-streaming.

Millgate said: “I am really excited to have joined the Bastion Collective family and am extremely passionate about being a force that drives the re-imagining of retail here in Australia.

“People still want to touch and feel an item before buying it.

“Whilst online shopping and mobile commerce are the keys to retail growth, harmonizing the physical and digital world is the new black.”

He added: “In-store experiences are changing.

“It’s moving toward feeling like you’re in your cool friend’s apartment, rather than a department store, and service is becoming a key differentiator between retailers.”

Since launching, Bastion Retail has been working with Microsoft’s XBOX in Korea by establishing a dedicated page and presence on Korea’s largest e-commerce and social site, Kakao.

Tactics have included providing weekly sales offers and creating and repurposing global content achieving some strong results in just a five-day-period; going from zero to 10,000 subscribers, 9 million impressions and 300,000 page views.

Millgate said: ”This is a great example of having global reach from our Sydney office, and with our knowledge across Asia providing strategic value, insight and on-time execution working closely with our consumer communications and PR agency, Bastion Effect to service the client”.