SAN ANTONIO, TX – A HelloWorld executive at eTail West 2014 mentioned two recent campaigns from Old Navy and Gap that give marketers insight into how to pull off integrating mobile into the in-store experience.

Executives from BCBG Max Azria Group, HelloWorld, Benchmark Brands/Footsmart and Zappos discussed new trends around customer service during the “A Transformation of Today’s Commerce-Oriented Customer Experiences” panel. The examples of the Gap and Old Navy campaigns show how retailers are combatting showrooming and price checking through their own unique in-store experiences.

“One area where we are seeing a lot of activity is around the marrying or the merging of the mobile and in-store experience,” said Eric Larson, chief revenue officer at HelloWorld, Pleasant Ridge, MI.

“We’ve done most recently with Old Navy and the Gap with some interesting and engaging experiences that are built like scavenger hunts and designed to both drive behavior through a store or shopping through a store by using your mobile device to find the tags,” he said. “In the case of Gap, it was a QR code, in the case of Old Navy it was snapping a photo of the little pictures placed around the store.

“They’re doing both to try and influence the shopping pattern, but then also learn from the shopping pattern and get more experience with the fact that every one of your shoppers has a mobile device that they’re probably checking 150 times per day as it is, so what’s the role and the opportunity within that for the retailer?”

Mobile engagement?
One of the key points discussed during the session was around how brands need to start packing multiple mediums into campaigns for the most engagement.

For example, Mr. Larson also mentioned a mobile and in-store campaign that HelloWorld worked on with Walgreens and CoverGirl.

The campaign tied into a film from “The Hunger Games” franchise with a personality quiz. Once consumers completed the quiz, they were given a unique makeup look from the film, shopping lists, social media content and videos.

Another example Mr. Larson discussed is beauty brand Bare Escentuals with a unique loyalty program. Instead of rolling out a points-based loyalty program, the cosmetic brand built a program around knowing information about a consumer such as their birthday or past purchase behavior to serve up spontaneous offers throughout the year.

The panel

Segmenting consumers
Lisa Archambault, head of brand/direct response digital marketing at Zappos, Las Vegas, also spoke about the different ways that the shoe brand is tailoring its online experience to specific groups of consumers.

The brand is creating virtual store fronts based on click-stream, first-party and third-party data to tailor the experience for consumers before they even come to the site.

Additionally, the executive discussed that as programmatic ad buying becomes more common for marketers, brands cannot lose sight of the storytelling aspect involved in marketing.

Zappos is also working on injecting more lifestyle content into video.

For example, instead of simply showing a video of a shoe, the brand’s video shows a model walking in a pair of shoes.

“For us, we’re scaling all the time and are trying to grow our customer base,” Ms. Archambault said.

“While we have a nice solid customer base, it’s scaling it while still staying relevant to the consumer and finding ways to speak to each consumer segment that comes to our site,” she said.