Article

At Marc Jacobs pop-up shop, customers paid with a tweet

The designer experimented with getting shoppers to trade social currency for their purchases.

February 11, 2014

The following is an excerpt from a recent conversation on RetailWire, reproduced here with kind permission. The author is RetailWire contributor George Anderson.

Designer Marc Jacobs recently opened a Daisy fragrance pop-shop in New York's SoHo neighborhood, but customers didn't need cash or cards to buy items. What they needed was to tweet on Twitter, post photos on Instagram or spread the news on Facebook to complete their purchases.

The Daisy Marc Jacobs Tweet Shop was open Feb. 7 to 9 and was part of a New York Fashion Week promotion. The shop featured a lounge with food, drinks and free Wi-Fi. Featured were Daisy-themed artwork created by illustrator and model Langley Fox Hemingway as well as displays of fragrances and Marc Jacobs fashion items and accessories.

Lori Singer, VP of marketing for Marc Jacobs, told Mashable that the pop-up shop was the company's way of saying "thank you" to the brand's fans.

"Marc Jacobs is really active on social media and Daisy is one of the fragrance brands that triggers the highest engagement among fans," Singer said. "We have seen people creating drawings and stage mood shots featuring the iconic bottle, so engagement of the fans is already there."

RetailWire BrainTrust comments:

As a short-term pop-up, I don't see a problem. Just like any event promotion where you are handing out free t-shirts as a premium, now you are trading awareness for something better than a freebie. Can't run a business that way, but for short-term, location-specific promotions, I don't see an issue. Basically, it's the new tech version of giving away free logo t-shirts and samples. — Kenneth Leung, Director of Enterprise Industry Marketing, Avaya

Not likely to work. It's like writing a book endorsement for a friend when you don't think the book is worth it. You can do it, but it has bad energy that reverberates for eternity. If endorsement Tweets and Facebook postings are done just to get something for free, they too are likely to ring hollow energetically. Mind you this will be a hot idea for a short while. — Ian Percy, President, The Ian Percy Corporation

Points for novelty. Will it work? Well, I am sure there will be more than enough consumers happy to post on social media in order to get a product for free. Is it worth doing? Maybe for this first one because it will generate an outsized amount of publicity as the concept gets reported in the media.

However, copycats are not likely to get the same return because the novelty will have worn off, and they will be trading their product purely for the social capital without the added publicity accorded to the first move. As such, it behooves the retailer to attempt to quantify the value of the social media mentioned, and assess how the ROI on this effort compares to that of other marketing initiatives.

I don't believe that this concept applies only for luxury brands. Rather, I believe that the success is related to the propensity to social media of the shoppers, and the degree to which the products are ones they would be proud to share. — Alexander Rink, CEO, 360pi

Read more about social media in retail.