London Retailers use Augmented Reality in a virtual scavenger hunt.

Genius Idea: Buzz has been big around augmented reality, but few companies have figured out a way to turn it into an effective marketing tool. We’ve seen brands invoke everything from Iron Man masks to musical cheese snacks in efforts to incorporate augmented reality into their marketing plans. But none of these ideas exactly created the AdWords of augmented reality.

GoldRun, which launched in November with a campaign for H&M, comes closer to creating a marketing platform that will be useful across multiple industries. The app allows brands to create virtual scavenger hunts. When consumers download the free GoldRun app and sign up to follow a campaign or “run,” they can collect virtual goods from physical locations using their phone’s camera. During the H&M campaign, for instance, users could collect a different virtual item from the brand’s fall/winter collection by snapping a photo of it in front of each of its 10 Manhattan locations. Doing so resulted in an instant 10% discount on any H&M purchase.

The platform’s agility is its greatest strength. AirWalk used the platform to build virtual pop-up stores in locations in Washington Square Park and Venice Beach at which app users could purchase a special edition shoe from its website (VP of Business Development Shailesh Rao calls it “V-Commerce”). The NBC’s Today Show ran a scavenger hunt for virtual items in Rockefeller Plaza. Esquire Magazine is planning a campaign that will virtually place its February cover model, Brooklyn Decker, in more than 700 Barnes and Noble stores. Other planned campaigns range from the Sundance Film Festival to Gwen Stefani’s perfume line.

GoldRun provides a more interactive and customizable approach to location-based advertising than check-in games like Foursquare (foursquare) and Gowalla (Gowalla). Campaigns, in addition to distributing special offers, include an option for users to create interesting photos (items in the H&M campaign, for instance, were positioned in a way in which they could be virtually “tried on”). Users share these photos through their Facebook (Facebook) profiles, which is more valuable for the brand than shared check-in information.

Given how eager brands have been to adopt location-based marketing through check-in apps, it’s not a surprise that many are eager to run campaigns on the GoldRun app. Rao says that more than 40 companies from various industries have approached the as of now self-funded startup about running a campaign. It will be interesting to see if consumers respond with equivalent enthusiasm.



Posted from Mashable

Manhatten Mecca

Over the last 12 months, Times Square in the heart of Manhattan has consolidated its position as the destination in New York for casual American fashion, but there are new stores right across the Big Apple

The phrase a ‘New York minute’ is usually taken to mean that time is compressed in the Big Apple when compared with other metropolises.

And things do seem to move a little faster here than in most other locations. But there is a sense of the permanent about much of the city’s retail offer. Landmarks abound, whether it’s Macy’s (still billed as the world’s largest department store), Bloomingdale’s or even the more recent Apple store at the southern tip of Central Park. It’s hard to escape the feeling that retailers who set up shop here are in for the long game.

A surprise therefore to find that in Times Square, the heart of Manhattan, much has changed during the last year. This is now the home of the megastore and over the last year Los Angeles-headquartered fashion outfit Forever 21 has opened the largest apparel store in Manhattan, while next door, Disney has opened a flagship that leaves what is on view in Europe somewhat in the shade. And to cap things, local talent Aéropostale, a national chain that operates from New York, has taken a site with a long sweeping frontage. The three newcomers join American Eagle, in creating what must be one of the most flashy retail locations on the planet - a destination that features astoundingly large screens on which ever-changing content makes it difficult to work out where to look.

There are, of course, other places to get a fresh retail perspective on New York. Uptown, in East Harlem, Target has opened its first Manhattan store, while the Brit invasion that has seen Topshop, All Saints (mobbed last Saturday), Ted Baker and Superdry setting up store in SoHo over the last two years has continued with the arrival of a Dr Martens shop in the same downtown neighbourhood.

There have also been a fair number of smaller, branded, shops that have taken the plunge, ranging from fashion, courtesy of designer Marc Jacobs with a Bookmarc store, to girl-friendly bike shop Adeline Adeline in the city’s modish Tribeca district.

Back to Times Square and the vast crowds of local and out-of-town shoppers attest to the fact that for a significant number this is the current retail destination of choice.

Disney


The largest Disney store in the US opened in November with two floors and about 12,000 sq ft of selling space. The stats are noteworthy in their own right. The six letters forming the word Disney above the door weigh a little over 2,000lbs and the 65 ft-high digital screen above this is “the highest resolution screen on Times Square”, according to Disney spokeswoman Shawn Turner. This means that clips of everything from the Lion King to Toy Story can be shown in almost cinematic quality.

Inside, the relatively modestly sized ground floor is a showcase for plush toys and New York-themed Disney products - which form about 10% of the offer in this store. Head upstairs and if you’ve been to one of the larger Disney stores around Europe of late, there will be much that seems familiar: just bigger. This floor has high walls and where it would have been easy to leave the area above the perimeter shelving blank, a frieze with silhouettes of Disney characters cheek-by-jowl with familiar New York skyline icons ensures that the shopper’s eye will not be allowed to rest easy for a moment.

At the back of the floor is a 20 ft-high castle. This is only about 6 ft high in Madrid and contains magic mirrors that allow shoppers to wave a ‘magic’ (RFID) wand in front of them and conjure up short clips from Disney cartoons. The effect is immersive and even if you don’t care for Disney, you will want to have a look around.

Forever 21


The largest apparel store in Manhattan goes a long way towards disguising the fact that the products on its four floors (a large ground floor, a basement, a sub basement and a sub sub basement) are inexpensive. This store is about making cheap look upscale. It does this by creating interior vistas that remind you of other stores, although it may be hard to place them. There is, for instance, an area on one of the lower floors where brightly coloured merchandise is displayed on walls where the surface has been covered with wallpaper that takes the form of a thin black on white grid. A cynic might perhaps be inclined to remark that it looks more than a little like American Apparel. Or perhaps you might feel that the bookcase-style fixturing in another part of the store is reminiscent of Polo Ralph Lauren. And there are Topshop references almost everywhere.

Adeline Adeline


Finally, a store that aims to provide a non-threatening environment for female cyclists or women who might like to try it out. With a very simple shopfit and stock that is about top-end wicker basket cycling, there is a make-do-and-mend ambience about the enterprise.

It is also staffed by women instead of the dispatch rider manqué more normally found in an independent bike store. By virtue of its position, in the lower part of lower Manhattan, it is clearly also a destination as this is a store that you would not happen upon by accident. Like all the others visited, it opened in 2010.

See full article at Retail Week

Window Science

I read a very poignant article by John Ryan yesterday about the shift in focus of store windows. There was a time where windows simply stood for one purpose, displaying products the shop sold so that customers would come in. Now however they have become a whole creative science...

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The idea was that a shop window would act as a sampler for what was on offer within. Very simple, and for many retailers it is still the principle driver when considering how to deal with the matter of window displays.

There is however a separate stream of thought that says that putting items in windows, be it clothing, computers or even paintbrushes, is probably not the best way of shifting stock and that something more needs to be done. Perhaps this may be the underlying reason for what’s happening at Selfridges on Oxford Street at the moment. The four windows that front the store’s “Wonder Room” at the western end of the building have a series of curious ‘installations’ (a word used more generally by fashionable art galleries), each designed to make you stop and stare.

Now it is the name of a trio of artists, a “collective” don’t y’know, who “challenge” our accepted views of things. Whatever your view on this, what is on show in Oxford Street is certainly interesting, ranging from a mass of tennis rackets (“Game”), to a gingham-clad table with white plates and bowls on it, displayed under the title “Tea for Two”.

This probably means something to somebody, but it does seem curious as part of a Selfridges window scheme. In fairness however, the whole notion of “The Wonder Room” is the retail equivalent of shock and awe (quite possibly at the prices) and fronting the area with something as unconventional as the work of the John Hour might seem justified.



More to the point, it makes a refreshing change from the “SALE, SALE, SALE” variants that fill the windows of the majority of other retailers along the street. The function of windows is in fact very straightforward: get ‘em to stop, get ‘em to think, get ‘em through the doors. It’s a principle that still gets overlooked.

Google's Retail Plans

Most retailers are aware by now that clean customer and product data is what will take their business to the next level in the coming years. It’s what will help them understand their customers and predict future buying patterns. But retailers aren’t the only ones keen to get control of it. Google is on a drive to get businesses to sign up to their latest e-commerce drive, which focuses on the value of information on local stock levels.

It might sound slightly dry, but it’s a good idea – keeping things local is at the heart of Tesco’s strategy for international expansion. Their group strategy director Andrew Higginson said at the National Retail Federation conference in New York last week, “Retail is still a local business. Even within the same city, two stores can display completely different needs. It’s a balance between getting global knowledge, IT and marketing consistent, and being absolutely local in what we offer consumers.”
Google appears to be on the same page, with business product manager Paul Lee speaking on the topic at the same conference.

There are two trends driving this. Firstly, the number of transactions that people research online and make in-store is rising to a predicted 64% of total purchases by 2019. So the real winners, Google says, will be bricks and mortar retailers who have useful information online – both about the product, and about where you can find it.

Secondly, the increasing use of mobile internet means people are searching in-store for immediate information. If they can’t find what they want on the shelves, they’ll search for it on their phones and go to the nearest place with the product they want in stock.

Google is working with technology suppliers like Oracle on the logistics of collecting this data, and already has a sizeable list of retailers signed up. Ventures like this are likely to need lots of work, aggregating and cleaning up data, uploading product listings to websites, and making sure it can be updated in real time. But if the big names are to be believed, the effort will be worth it.

Rebecca Thomson for Retail Week