When Decathlon opened Hong Kong’s largest sports store in June its marketing plans made particular use of location data to successfully drive footfall.
And that was more than usually necessary as the new 36,000 square feet space in Sheung Tak Plaza in Tseung Kwan O was in a neighbourhood mall rather than the high-traffic, high-rent areas of the French retailer’s two existing Hong Kong stores in Causeway Bay and Mong Kok.
The new outlet is based on the offer of interactive retail experiences, where people can try out all manner of sports products in a huge outdoor rooftop terrace above the retail space.
“If we want people to test [our equipment], we need space,” Marc Zielinski, Decathlon Hong Kong’s chief executive, explained at the opening. “At the same time, we need to adapt to a Hong Kong reality where we don’t have space everywhere.”
The accompanying marketing campaign had to not only drive awareness before the opening but store traffic afterwards. While OOH and digital channels addressed the former, location technology informed a programmatic activation for the latter.
“This drive-to-store campaign was really the final push at the bottom of the funnel to drive sports lovers in the store vicinity to visit Decathlon Tseung Kwan O,” Benjamin Darde, marketing lead for Decathlon Hong Kong, told The Drum.
“Thanks to the ‘Find Your Way’ call to action and the location service, we could track precisely the footfall of that channel, which – combined with our in-store metrics – allowed to get a clear measurable understanding of the traffic we generated through the entire campaign.”
The initial figures of 150,000 visitors over the first few weeks suggests that this approach has been successful. And Decathlon intends to apply the learnings from this campaign – which include audience insights around factors like age, gender, interest and time of day – to future store openings.
Decathlon’s agency Havas has elsewhere tapped location data to develop geo-targeted digital flyers for Danish shoppers, reducing the costs of print and distribution while successfully reaching a younger audience segment than the traditional Aldi customer.
Sourced from The Drum, South China Morning Post; additional content by WARC staff
