Shopper Culture

Driving Traffic From One Holiday Shopping Location to Another Via Interactive Text

Hanging flat-screens and speakers were recently installed at a local mall's food court. During this holiday season, a “text in your song request, and get entered to win an XBox” promotion took advantage of this new entertainment technology. I decided to participate. I texted in my song request, and received a text reply stating “…Your song will play in less than 1 minute. Reply Xbox and enter for a chance to win an XBOX 360!” So I did. I then received another text stating that I was entered, the drawing date, and the url for the promotion background and rules.  Once my video started playing I received another text stating, “Your song is playing now! Reply bestbuy to get $30 Best Buy gift card offer w/Xbox 360 Elite purchase. Expires 12/31/09.” So I did, and received a promotional code to give a cashier.

 


This is an interesting promotion because, first, the goal was to drive people away from one shopping location (this mall) to another shopping location. (Best Buy was not located inside this mall.) Second, the location and interaction of the promotion was unique. Third, the promotion helped identify purchase intent for an XBox in a friendly way. I got to listen to my chosen music without ever having to enter the contest or replying that I was intending to buy an Xbox 360 by year’s end.

While text promotions provide the next chapter for CRM programs, I’m curious to watch how the face of CRM will evolve and change in this new digital age.

Print Ad Effectiveness

A full-page iPhone print ad in USA Today^(R), featured 16 call outs and 16 brands—18 brands, including iPhone and AT&T^(R). It's not a very sexy ad at all—a bunch of logos inside a big black rectangle with lots of text. There’s a lot going on. Doesn't this go against what a print ad should do? One singular message, one singular thought? It could be argued the main message here is, "There's an app for that." There isn’t even a directly spelled-out call to action. Yet, when I saw this ad, I read every single app call out and immediately went to my iPhone and downloaded four new apps. I loved my iPhone even more after engaging with my new-found apps. The ad works. Maybe not the way marketers once believed print ads should work back in the '90s or even five years ago. The world of communication is changing. Who's still playing in the 1990s?

Digital Signage – More Than Just Signs

Digital signs are a great way to attract people’s attention with moving graphics, movies, informational banners, and more. But how well do these displays work? Audience-measuring technologies allow real-time monitoring, metrics, and analysis; which allows marketers and advertisers to know who is viewing their displays, how many views have occurred, how long people stay at a display, and during what time of day they are there. This information can provide great ROI for both digital and static displays. Advanced software detects and isolates the faces of people viewing a display and can determine gender and race and even estimate a person’s age.  While this may seem a bit intrusive, the software applications that perform this type of analytics do so anonymously. To respect privacy, it is a general practice not to record images or other personally identifiable information. In most cases, the camera that is used to capture information is not easily detectable by people near the display, which reduces the creep factor for consumers.  

Recharge your brand

Even when air travel goes as planned, it seems inevitable that our laptop, cellphone or iPod will need a charge at some point during the trip. Seems like it shouldn’t be a problem right? You have your charger, appropriate adapters and now all you need is an outlet.

Easy enough, right?

Well, Not so fast.

As you take inventory of your charging/power opportunities in a gate designed to hold several hundred passengers, you realize there are only 3 plugs. All of which are either in use, under an occupied bench or on wall adjacent to a busy walkway. An easy charge has now turned into a painful journey that is sure to be inconvenient.

Luckily, Samsung has come to the rescue … at least in the Minneapolis/St. Paul International airport. In one gate area in the Minneapolis airport, there were several of these charging stations offering free convenient charging. Samsung’s unique piece is a creative solution that makes use of airports inherent design flaws and successfully parlays them into a useful retail and branding opportunity.

On the surface, Samsung’s piece could be seen as a new use for digital signage, but that fails to mention the true significance of this piece. That’s just the beginning of the story.

We live in a world and retail environment where everyone wants to play, but the price of admission is becoming increasingly challenging and elusive. Are the days of plastering your logo and message on any surface you can find becoming a thing of the past? 

As media continues to be diversified, the larger question seems to be, how do brands earn the right to play in the first place? Moreover, how do they not only earn the right, but how do they create a platform where interaction is ensured?

The significance of the Samsung piece isn't the design, or message, but the fact that it is beneficial exchange between the brand and the user. Similarly, Delta Airlines has begun installing recharging booths (above) and outlet seating clusters (below) into their own gates that charge both standard voltage and USB, recognizing travelers' increasing use of iPods and other handheld devices. We are seeing similar charging consoles popping up in airports throughout the United States. With traveling as difficult as it is, a little goodwill can go a long way.

As brands and retailers continue to create advertising space anywhere possible in an already cluttered environment, we encourage marketers to follow Samsung's lead. When marketing is able to offer something memorable or useful, something beyond the hard-sell messaging we are accustomed to, people are bound to take note.   

- Contributed by Garrett Davis

Retailers Offer Tech Savvy Gift Cards

With the combination of a slowing economy and stiffening competition for the growing gift card market, Target and Best Buy are hoping their tech savvy gift cards will catch the attention of consumers. The new Best Buy card has a built-in speaker with a mini headphone jack which can play music from MP3 players, iPods or your computer. Target's card doubles as a 1.2 megapixel digital camera, about the quality of the one on your cellphone, with memory for 50 pictures.

Both are promoting this as a way to personalize gift cards, which often get a rap as "thoughtless" gifts. They are offering the techy add-ons for any card over $50.

A 2007 Gift Card Study by Bankrate found that the average amount of each gift card was $53, so will the $50 price point for the premium gift card influence people to up their dollar amounts?

Retailers like Wal-Mart, JC Penney, Kmart, Toys R Us, and Cirut City are prematurely starting holiday sales, offering Black Friday prices as early as this week. Is this another way to compete with early holiday price promotions?

Engadget says even with the wiz-bang features, gift cards are still a "lazy present." It's a cool innovation, but will it provide a competitive advantage to these retailers? Is the technology to lo-fi for people to even use, or is it lo-fi enough to be cool?

In-Store Marketing Expo

Las Vegas plays host to the In-Store Marketing Expo this year from November 12th to 14th. The Integer Group will be presenting two bodies of recent work.

Our Dallas office will be presenting some of the findings from their Consumer Electronics work. Their presentation is entitled "The Consumer Electric: How and Why People Buy Electronics" and is at on Thursday, November 13, from 2:30 – 3:30 PM.

Our Denver office will be presenting some of the recent work undertaken on the Convenience Store Channel.  Their presentation is entitled "Redefining the C-Store:  Moving from Functional Convenience Stores to Creating Convenience Stories" and is on the same day in the morning from 10:45 – 11:45 AM.

If you are travelling to Vegas, then do drop by, catch the presentations and say hello. If you can't make it, we hope to make the presentations available here later in the month, so check back.

White Paper: Women and consumer electronics: A love story

Our team in Dallas have just produced a new white paper based on the Consumer Electronics Study undertaken in 2007.  The paper looks at the needs and wants of the female shopper in the Consumer Electronics category and offers some thoughts on how to effectively engage them.  Click here to download the paper.

Making the most of a Super Bowl promotion

The Super Bowl is a tremendous opportunity for anyone in the retail business to capture momentum in sales volume early in the year.  Though cash-strapped from the holidays, consumers spend an estimated $11.7 billion on Super Bowl parties, a month after the traditional holiday season is over.  The event is bigger than the game, as we all head to Super Bowl parties to sample part of the $5 billion worth of goods the hosts bought, or the $6.7 billion worth of goods the rest of us guests threw in nationwide.   Sales data shows us that its not just chips ($33.4 million), meat ($16.6 million), soda ($18.6 million), and beer ($20.7 million), being purchased incrementally, but nearly 4 million HD TVs (65 % bought at Wal-Mart or Best Buy) and 1.8 million pieces of furniture outfitting living rooms. This, and the fact that it is consistently the highest rated TV program of the year, makes the Super Bowl a boon for all the brands that stand to benefit from the occasion.

Brands market at retail for the Super Bowl in a variety of ways. Brands like Coors Light, Pepsi, Doritos and others pay the NFL for official sponsorship and rights to the marks for the Super Bowl. Non-sponsors like Coke, Miller Lite, and Kellogg’s use generic terms like the “Big Game” to try to capture the essence of the big game. The biggest retailers “took back” the Super Bowl by creating their own programming themes. But promotional programs that most brands execute offer fewer, bigger prizes, don’t interact with the shopper beyond their experience at the shelf. Despite their efforts, most promotions seem generic because everyone is doing the same thing. Brands with the greatest connection to football parties – especially food and beverage brands – tout the “Ultimate Party” but don’t give us a compelling reason to believe them.

It’s as if most Super Bowl brands are talking to themselves and not their audience – the fans. And the fans can tell the difference.

We the fans want to have the best experience possible.  And, unless you are a one of the few fans that has connections, your chance of getting tickets to the game is nil. The biggest fans, the most loyal ones, are watching at home because they simply can’t go to the live event.  So the game becomes a reason to get together with friends, consume copious amounts of stuff and enjoy a pop-culture event with no equal. Outside of the host stadium, the Super Bowl is 28 million parties with 154 million viewers, who are there for the game, the advertising, and to be with friends, in that order. The host's success is measured on putting out a great spread, showing off the home theater, or placing a friendly bet on which quarterback will throw the first interception.

So, what can brands do more to enhance our experience before, during and after the pinnacle moment of kickoff?  How can brands connect with the shopper at retail when there is so much clutter and noise in the context of a shopper wants to get in, get out and get to where they are going?  At a time when everyone is sponsoring everything, how can a brand be authentic to an increasingly skeptical audience? 

When there is so much opportunity to make a great impression for the Super Bowl, brands need to create programming that breaks through the clutter at retail and communicates a relevant message for the shopper. Brands must connect with the consumer in a meaningful way, understanding the insights of what the Super Bowl occasion is about. And perhaps most importantly, brands need to connect to their audience in a way that is authentic to the brand, while most of all remaining true to the fans.

- Contributed by Eric Anhold

Source: ACNielsen: average weekly sales for two weeks ending Feb. 10 2007; BigResearch: CIA survey, Jan 2007

Image credits: In-Store Marketer

Shopping behaviour in electronics

Our Dallas office does a lot of work in the consumer electronics category and late last year undertook a study looking at what influences behaviour in this category.  This generated a fair amount of interest in the media including an interview on Fox with Kim Menier, who heads up the strategy group in Dallas.  Have a look at the interview here, and if this is your category let's start a conversation. We'd love to know your thoughts on the findings and comments Kim makes, so leave us a comment.