Stealing eyeballs / As a high street electronics retailer, Elgiganten needs creative solutions to get people through the door. It needs to ensure that people will choose the heritage brand over Amazon or a more convenient, cheaper option. So, with a small budget, how does an electronics shop go about grabbing attention and bringing in customers? By hijacking a popular cultural event, the brand surreptitiously transformed an entire football audience into potential customers.
Leveraging well-watched events such as football is a simple mechanic, but it’s an effective one. In 2015, Volvo side-stepped the expensive ad spend needed for a Superbowl spot. Instead, it asked people to enter a competition by tweeting #VolvoContest whenever they saw any Superbowl car commercial – hijacking other brands’ ad spend and stealing valuable eyeballs. We know, that piggy-backing an event that garners mass attention works, whether that’s to boost brand awareness or increase sales.
FOMO / The hour-long discount window works to drive urgency around the promotion. Since the offer only lasts an hour, people have to pay attention and act quickly to snap up the deals. Behavioural scientist Richard Shotton explains why this strategy is effective in his book The Choice Factory – while there is pain in making big payments, manipulating the time-frame in which those payments are made reduces price sensitivity.
As well as cushioning the blow, flash sales foster impulsivity and excitement. Scott Rick, associate professor of marketing at the University of Michigan, was part of a team of researchers in 2007 who looked at people’s brains in an MRI as they made purchases. The brain’s pleasure centre lit up when people bought something, but this effect enhances when that item was in a sale. ‘Part of it is, we love a game,’ says Rick. ‘We don’t have a lot of them in our everyday life, and the idea of not wanting to miss out on getting the best deal becomes a kind of competition.’
We saw Meat Pack win a Gold award at the 2012 Cannes Lions Festival by similarly leveraging this price-time sensitivity concept. The brand’s campaign stole customers from the likes of Nike and Adidas, by offering huge countdown discounts on shoes, which activated when customers entered a competitor’s store.
