Neiman Marcus Social Experiment Doesn’t Go Nearly Far Enough
Written by Evan SchumanNeiman Marcus on September 29 announced an unusual-sounding Foursquare marketing campaign. The chain hid cards giving away 15 $1,000 handbags (Nancy Gonzalez clutches, to be precise) in its stores and used Foursquare to reveal a clue to help shoppers find the product. A statement the chain issued said the system would “indicate whether the user is in the vicinity of a hidden clutch.” But in actual fact, the system didn’t know anything beyond the fact that the consumer had entered a particular store.
It then offered a clue. For a store in Ft. Worth, Texas, for example, the tease said: “It may be a Full House but we are convinced you will go bananas for this bag. Find it and win the bag.” The promotion couldn’t really indicate how close the customer was to the gift, because Foursquare’s GPS signal typically ends the instant the customer enters the building. Neiman Marcus couldn’t go any farther, “because of our infrastructure. We’d need to have sensors all over the store,” said Jean Scheidnes, the chain’s manager of social media. But what if a chain did deploy such a network of in-store sensors? The potential could go way beyond fun and games.
Instead of having one clue, which would either send customers to the right place or not, you could have a series of clues sending the presumably-not-time-starved customers along a path that would coincidentally be proximate to the highest margin items in the store.
Given the individual nature of a mobile device, the routes (all of which end up in the same 15 places) could be varied based on the customer profile. In other words, it might be more profitable to send one customer through sporting goods and a different customer through apparel. Barcodes scanned en route would display information and hints. But it would also provide clean ROI data about what products the customers thought about during the trip.
In short, the potential of mobile coupled with in-store sensors could take customer marketing five orders of magnitude into the future. Many chains are already enabling consumers to ride on the store’s Wi-Fi network, so the security and cost issues of additional sensors is hardly huge. Without sensors, the store is one big mobile black hole.
-Marc
October 6th, 2011 at 1:33 pm
This sounds like a typical outing to Costco, except it’s “where are the paper towels?” But seriously, you are right that existing in-store Wi-Fi networks could be leveraged to act as the sensors needed for location-based services, or games. The effort comes on the back end (location engine, customer database) and front end (mobile app). But similar ‘wayfinding’ apps are out there today to find a particular store in a mall, or a particular product on a shelf in a hypermarket. The innovation here is to make it a game, and provide a reward. This makes it more fun to shop, and remarkable – leading players to tweet or post to FB their experience to their social networks and drive more interest.
October 7th, 2011 at 12:51 am
This one may not have worked .. but Congrats! to Neiman Marcus for taking a chance and thinking outside the box. It’s one additional step in all of our continuous learning when it comes to social media.
October 7th, 2011 at 7:54 am
I certainly wouldn’t say that it may not have worked. Customers quickly found the items and all of the associated good feelings happened. As far as I can tell, it worked fine for what it was. Was merely arguing that it could have gone far farther.
October 7th, 2011 at 9:49 am
This technique appear to be a form of “war-driving” and probably would work very well with NFC technology and NFC tag stickers to give clues inside the store. I think it is a great marketing scheme to get people to go to a locale and shop as you indicated. Based on a person preference, have them scavenger hunt in a mall for products and have them visit stores for clues, increasing traffic and activity.