Marc Jacobs makes shopping social with pop-up tweet shop
Marc Jacobs is opening a pop-up shop in London that will allow shoppers to exchange tweets, pictures and Vines for products as part of wider plans to boost engagement with its social media audience through rewards.
The store will open today (15 August) for three days at its location in Covent Garden. Shoppers who go to the store will be able to get their hands on Marc Jacobs products without money exchanging hands.
A simple tweet with the hashtag #mjdaisychain is worth a mini fragrance while those that include an image or video related to Marc Jacobs will get a key ring or free manicure at the in-store nail bar. The store will also run competitions, giving away products including handbags.
Natalie Moon, UK marketing director at Coty, which owns the license for Marc Jacob fragrances, tells Marketing Week that the aim of the store is to reward the brand’s social media audience. She says its fans are already tweeting images and videos of its products and this is a way of using that engagement to create buzz around the brand.
“We’ve got a deeply engaged follower group who are spontaneous, creative and give a lot to us. This was a chance for us to give something back to them,” she adds.
Marc Jacobs launched its first pop-up shop in New York, but this is the first instance of the concept outside the US. The New York store attracted more than 10,000 shoppers, which Moon says is a “good benchmark” to track the success of the London store.
The brand will also track digital buzz via tweets, retweets and favourites, as well as the popularity of the #mjdaisychain hashtag. Moon says there is no limit to how many times one person could tweet in exchange for a product, with every post providing “more social visibility”.
However, she ruled out running the concept again in the UK, although Marc Jacobs will repeat it in other countries. Moon says the whole point of the pop-up shop is to boost the brand’s creativity and innovation credentials.
“The beauty of something like this is the here and now. I don’t believe it is something we’ll do again [in the UK] because it loses something. It’s about finding the next new idea. We don’t want our audience to know what is coming next,” she adds.
The move is part of a wider strategy by Marc Jacobs to engage its social media audience as it looks to achieve cut-through in a competitive market. It recently launched a campaign to find real people from its Twitter and Instagram fanbase to front its global Autumn 2014 range as it looks to bring a social media twist to its marketing.