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Oakville Place’s Stylista Challenge drew 1,000 participants and generated 6.5 million hits on the center’s website
Jenny Jovanovic didn’t expect to produce miracles when she put on the Stylista Challenge this past fall at Oakville Place. As in many other shopping centers, the economy had curtailed traffic at the Canadian mall. Still, the marketing director had hoped to reinvigorate retail sales during the Back to School season with a contest in which customers would have a chance to win a $3,000 shopping spree, or one of two runner-up prizes consisting of a $500 Oakville Place gift card. It turns out that she was onto something.
From August 27 through September 6, shoppers were invited to visit Oakville Place and line up in front of the stage in Center Court where they’d have a turn styling a mannequin, picking any items from the numerous racks of clothing and accessories that mall retailers had provided for the event. After completing the task, participants had their pictures taken beside their styled mannequin and the photographs were immediately uploaded to Oakville Place’s contest website. The public could then log on to the site between September 8 and 16, and vote for their favorite look.
The interactive nature of the Stylista Challenge got more than 1,000 people to enter, and their enthusiasm was noticeable.
“We informed participants of a 30-minute time limit during peak traffic hours but allowed each person to complete their look,” Jovanovic recalled. “Some customers were having such a fun time that they spent up to one hour styling their mannequin! This was a really fun event for friends to do together, so several entrants participated in groups of 2 or 3, resulting in over 1,000 people partnering to submit 625 entries. We limited the amount of people participating at any given time to 10.”
According to Jovanovic, men, women and children of all ages participated. That said, the target group that submitted the most entries was—predictably—women ages 16 through 25.
Once all of the entries were up on the contest site, the voting began. The Stylista Challenge managed to generate 6.5 million hits on the site and more than 196,000 votes—contest winner Rebecca Kupferstein received 36,368 votes. Such numbers not only showed the potential of the event concept, but it demonstrated the power of viral marketing.
“We decided to leave [most of] the event promotion up to our customers. We promoted the event onsite (posters, door decals, digital screens, read-o-graph and stickers on participating stores’ windows), on our website and through our e-newsletter, then left the rest up to our shoppers. As a small centre, with an equally small budget, we wanted to test the reach of word-of- mouth and social networking,” Jovanovic said.
“They twittered, posted [entries] on Facebook and blogged online about the contest. Social media did the work of promoting this contest, which succeeded in generating positive word-of-mouth in the community, attracting visitors to our website. Most importantly, our customers were able to see the wide range of fashions available from the retailers in our shopping center.”
With their product ranges in the limelight, a few retailers decided to offer bounce-back pieces.
“We have not yet received the sales numbers from our retailers, but several tenants said that the event had a positive impact on their store traffic and sales,” Jovanovic added. “Mall traffic was slightly down from last year. However, the percent decrease was much smaller than in previous months. Our customers loved this event and several contacted me personally to tell me how much fun they had. Our tenants were thrilled with the significant online exposure.”
The Marketing Crew
• Marketing director Jenny Jovanovic and her team
• CAO Productions It coordinated the staffing and production of the event. The firm’s stylists selected all of the merchandise from Oakville Place retailers and its team staffed the set.
• Parade, a division of Circus Strategic Communications, created and managed the online voting mini-website.
• Juniper Park created the artwork and on-site advertising pieces. Jovanovic said that the ad creative and contest site were the only major costs that the center incurred, making its Stylista Challenge relatively inexpensive. She also pointed out that these were one-time charges, as the center plans to reuse the material next year.
The Next Level
The inaugural Stylista Challenge generated enthusiasm in the marketplace and is already on Oakville Place’s 2010 back-to-school event roster. However, marketer Jenny Jovanovic wants to step up her strategic planning and negotiate a promotional deal with either a media outlet or a community partner. This might help the center gain some traditional media coverage—it didn’t get any for the Stylista Challenge this year, but received lots of online coverage through blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other similar sites.
Jovanovic also intends to involve Oakville Place retailers to a greater extent so that, in addition to providing merchandise for the styling sessions, they can also help develop a set of bounce-back promotional offers that would add value for the customers. Other possible add-ons include promotion via Oakville Place’s soon-to-becreated Facebook page.
The Trendz Twist
Harness the full sales and PR potential of your styling event by doing the following:
1. Extend your event creative to include visual displays which participating retailers can use in their stores to encourage sales of the items used in the styling challenge.
2. Promote the merchandise that the retailers provided for the challenge by featuring them as some of the must-have items of the season. You can do it online through your email newsletter and within the fashion pages of your mall website.
3. Find a media partner for the challenge—either a radio station or fashion magazine. This will help you offset your promotional costs, attract more participants and ensure postevent publicity.
4. Use the formula to support sales in under-performing categories.
• For home wares, put on a holiday table dressing challenge.
• For food, ask shoppers to put together a menu for a special occasion.
• If specialty store sales are in a slump, come up with a challenge in which shoppers have to pack a suitcase with everything they need for a weekend getaway. You can provide the suitcase and basic wardrobe, and it will then be up to contest participants to add accessories (leather goods, jewelry), toiletries and a little first-aid kit (from the drugstore), stationery items, a guidebook, maps and trip journal (from the bookstore) and other essentials. Then, ask contestants to explain on camera why they believe they should win a getaway. Post their videos on you mall’s website and let the public vote for their favorite contestants.
Work with a travel agent, hotel chain, automobile association (e.g. CAA or AAA), and travel magazine to offer a grand-prize getaway, complete with accommodation, transportation, gift cards redeemable at the participating mall retailers and a digital camera (courtesy of your photo store) that the winners can use to record the adventure and later report on it via your mall website or blog.
Nov.
2009
2009
Posted in Feature
