Why you need to use Pop Up stores for your marketing activations and how to do it.
Pop Up Stores are physical spaces set up for a specified period and preferably in a strategic location that is consistent with and relates to the brand identity.
They usually have an attractive and innovative look to deliver a branded shopping experience to customers. The name is fancy, it’s true. But you’ve sure seen one before, like a food truck or a small kiosk in the middle of a mall corridor.
In general, online marketers who rely on this store model seek to reach new customers, test brand performance and engage fans in a direct-to-consumer effort.
What do Pop Up Stores have to do with events?
In-store events have always been a great strategy to bring customers to a physical space. And Pop Up stores are showing up as one of the best ways to generate genuine excitement while innovating when doing a marketing activation. That’s actually one of the most tangible examples of what an experience means.
Most common uses of Popup overlay include: product launch parties, book signings, VIP events, special dates events, educational marketing activations, experiential give aways and several other occasions Make sure you have robust crowd control in place if it’s a large event and take the reasonable steps to ensure pedestrian routes are not blocked.
What is a Pop Up Store?
The main aspects of pop-up stores are:
Limited time:
Usually between 1 day and 3 months, but there are cases of pop-up stores that have been open for a year.
Location:
Focuses on walking areas such as airports, city centers, malls, sports events, music festivals, etc.
Costs:
Much lower than a traditional store for requesting a rent for a short term space.
Opportunities:
Test new features that go to a fixed physical store, boost sales, launch products, drive brand and customer engagement, investigate how a locations reacts to the brand.
Why Pop Up stores are Important and main advantages
Innovation: Mobile marketing technologies such as augmented realities keep evolving and bringing an array of possibilities to be tests on pop up shops. Plus, 100% online brands have the chance to interact with their customers on the real world for a cost that is 80% lower than a full-scale retail model shop.
Target a very specific niche: if the main objective of a brand pop up store is to sell, it can aggressively market with visual merchandise and discount coupons for a very short period of time.
Explore new markets: Testing new products and possibilities is also about trying new markets. A pop up store can provide a lot of insights about a region or a kind of consumer with a way lower cost than any other full-package business model.
Pop up stores successful cases
Ikea
The Swedish furniture and interior design retailer IKEA set a box, in the middle of the street, to represent a truly New York City studio apartment equipped with more than 150 IKEA items. The “apartment” moved through iconic neighborhoods of NY during the four preceding days of the Manhattan’s unit grand opening. The final result: US$ 1 million worth of products sold even before the official store was open.
Barkshop
Pet shop Barkshop invites some dogs to test and try some of their toys, in 2016. The temporary was in NY, in 2016. Dogs had their personalized RFID vests as their credential – and the vest tracked the toys were playing the most. Their humans, then, could check their best-friends favorite toys and purchase them from an exclusive event app designed for the occasion.
Amazon Go
Amazon used pop up stores in San Francisco to test frictionless checkouts, in 2016. Customers could just walk out of the store and their debt was automatically deducted from the balance in the app.
the roll out of the cashless model grew and Amazon Go has, as up to this date, 18 working units. However, the company is reformulating the strategy and now is planning to accept cash in their pop up stores. However,
Traditional VS Disruptive: dispute or partnership?
In conclusion, to monitor the effectiveness of innovation introduced as a branding tool, physical and digital channels need to take advantage of data integration. There’s no more fights for traditional and digital marketing, or the old school and the disruptive trends. Marketing is all about integration now. That’s the first step for the upcoming years and the systematization of analyses they’ll bring about customer satisfaction and profitability.
Conclusion and key takeaways
Retail and event industry always had a lot in common. Now, Retail 4.0 and the new MICE industry have more intersections than ever before. Market intelligence and digitization present the opportunity for these industries to learn a lot with each other. More than that, they can benefit from ongoing experiential innovations as few industries can.
Events are behavioral change factors that enchant consumers on short and long term. Meanwhile, retailers have to improve their customer experience in a way that it not only adds value, but becomes a product on it’s own. It’s the same idea of community that they both look out to use as a main marketing strategy.
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