Last week, Mashable’s Macala Wright Lee shared her advice on fashion brands using location-based marketing to engage customers. As a professional with an interest in learning more about these types of social media tools, I wanted to share Lee’s thoughts on this emerging trend. She explained, “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.”
Lee also suggested an alternative to implementing Foursquare from in-house: “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).”
In this post, Lee particularly focused on Diesel as an insightful example of lessons learned from soft-launching a Foursquare campaign. In conjunction with their Be Stupid campaign, the fashion brand held a one-day event giving a discount to customers checking in to their flagship store. Diesel decided to organically promote the Foursquare event without any proactive pre-promotion outreach to bloggers and online writers.
PR Couture‘s Crosby Noricks shared her thoughts on this strategy, “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.”
Currently fashion brands are still green as they use this type of marketing. Glamour Magazine Technology Editor Amalia Agathou said, “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.”
Here’s a list of brands already experimenting with this type of marketing tool. Check out the following for great case studies:
Consuming PR 
I love foursquare! I think foursquare can be a powerful marketing tool. I agree there is often a gap between online marketing and physical customer interaction. Foursquare has grown in presence though, and though not a fashion brand, Starbucks has a new $1 off with a ‘Foursquare-Starbucks mayorship’ special.
-Rusty
That’s a great Starbucks campaign! Thanks for sharing, Rusty.
Best,
Sarah