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Testing the power of location-based fashion marketing started with Marc Jacobs and Foursquare
“With the rise of mobile, the mixing of the web with the physical world seems only like the natural evolution of things. Mobile apps that combine location, real-time and social characteristics are in high demand by brands that want to promote their sales, and most of all, give to their physical stores a touch of the social ‘glitter’ of the web,” says Amalia Agathou, Technology Editor for Glamour Magazine in Greece.
So what can brands learn as they start creating geo-location marketing campaigns? A look at Diesel’s recent efforts yields valuable insights.
Diesel’s “Faces of Stupid” Campaign
The Faces of Stupid campaign is a contest in which people can come into a Diesel store and get stickers that read “BE STUPID.” The contestants then put the stickers anywhere on themselves, take a picture, and send it to the Faces of Stupid website, along with their “stupid stories.” Contestants are then entered to win include exotic prizes, like swimming with sharks off South Africa or cutting a record in Jamaica.
“This contest is a way for us to communicate the global campaign in a very viral and fun way, as obviously a huge portion of our audience are avid web surfers,” says Diesel’s Vice President of Marketing David Ireland. “Faces of Stupid is a great way to utilize the web for everyone to share their own ‘STUPID’ experience and give away a ridiculously awesome prize to the winner. These are all trips that we would love to take … I’ll be kind of jealous of our winner, to be honest.”
To date, the contest is one of the most intricate campaigns implemented by a fashion brand. When asked why Diesel went to such lengths for the promotion, Ireland said, “It was a natural extension of the brand’s overall philosophy towards its customers. [At Diesel], we live the lifestyle that we sell, and we want to share that with the people that are fans of the brand. We book the bands that we want to hear, we throw parties that we want to go to — that’s what has always made Diesel so amazing. It’s just a very authentic relationship between the brand and our customers.”
Foursquare as an Organic, Viral Marketing Tool
During a one-day event at Diesel’s flagship store in New York, Foursquare users who checked in within a three-city block radius of the Union Square location were alerted of a special promotion at that store. Once they checked in to the Diesel venue, they had their choice of specially printed tee shirts in red or purple.
Diesel didn’t create a Foursquare badge as Marc Jacobs did for their event. Instead, they offered a “deal,” and focused on utilizing Foursquare as a promotional tool to bring people into a retail store that they otherwise may not have entered. Within the first hour, the store saw four people come in and do just that. “To me, that’s tremendously exciting,” said Leslie Hall, founder of Iced Media, the agency responsible for the online components of the campaign.
For the Foursquare initiatives, Diesel chose not to extensively promote the event. “We wanted it to be a true test,” said Hall. “We didn’t want one hundred blog features going up beforehand. We wanted the promotion to roll out in a very organic way, much like the overall campaign has.”
Stats: Diesel’s Campaign Could Have Been Bigger
Looking at Diesel’s audience, their customers are mostly males between 18-30 years old. Foursquare’s users are about 65% male, so it made sense for Diesel to partner with Foursquare for the campaign.
During the event, Diesel reported 44 check-ins, 17 tweets, and 20,957 aggregate Twitter users reached from those social updates.
In an analysis of the Diesel campaign results, Crosby Noricks, founder of PR Couture, and Senior Social Media Strategist at Red Door Interactive said “It’s exciting to see Diesel acknowledge the tremendous potential inherent in Foursquare’s online-offline integration by including this as a component of their ‘Be Stupid’ campaign. While it was obviously not their intent to make a big deal out of this promotion, I’m not sure this was the most effective execution in terms of harnessing and identifying the real potential of the Foursquare community for the brand.”
Noricks continued, “In this iteration, without pre-promotion, it also failed to drive the level of activity I feel would be required to qualify its replication, although I applaud them heartily for trying. What is potentially more valuable for the brand is the post-event coverage that promotes Diesel as an innovating, digitally-savvy company who puts together pretty incredible experiential opportunities for its customers.” Noricks added that she hoped to see Jimmy Choo follow suit with its post-event coverage.
What Fashion Brands Can Learn From Diesel
“Luxury brands have used location-based services like Foursquare to create buzz and promote new lines and stores. The challenge for the retailers is to find ways to use these services in order to build a cohesive shopping experience in the web/mobile and the physical world. The retailers are now presented with a plethora of geo-location apps to choose from, but it remains to be seen the amount of control they will want to have on them. On the e-commerce front, the battle is already on between eBay and Louis Vuitton,” says Amalia Agathou.
As more fashion brands start to use location-based services like Gowalla and Foursquare to drive online customers into retail locations, it’s important to remember that location-based marketing efforts can and should be used to accomplish more than one marketing goal. Brands should strive to not only engage customers, but to enhance their shopping experiences.
Improving in-store customer service or loyalty programs are additional ways Foursquare could be implemented, though many retailers are cautious about that route, noting the network is still in its early-adoption phase, and full integration may be cost prohibitive.
If integrating Foursquare into the marketing mix seems too complicated, or if it doesn’t match a brand’s core audience, consider partnering with a publication that is already exploring these strategies. Lucky Magazine has already started developing a solid presence on Foursquare, and has interactive and socially-enabled smartphone applications that show great marketing potential, for example. Tristan Walker, Vice President of Business Development for Foursquare informed us that a customer loyalty program integration usually costs less than $10,000 to implement (as seen in the case of Tasti D-Lite).
There are many ways retailers and brands can dip their toes into location-based marketing. Just remember that those who do it before their competitors stand the best chance of reaping the big rewards.
