H&M bridges social media and mobile with location-based campaign

By Lauren Johnson

August 22, 2012

Instagram photos for the H&M event

H&M is putting mobile advertising at the forefront of a social media-fueled campaign that ultimately aims to drive in-store traffic.

The campaign is being used in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles and runs through Aug. 31. The mobile ads are running inside the Associated Press mobile site.

?It?s about knowing where customers are located in relation to the store, and timing messages and offers to them based on proximity to a store?s location,? said Rip Gerber, CEO of Locaid Technologies, San Francisco.

?The strategy is all about connecting the physical world with the digital world ? the bricks with the clicks, if you will,? he said. ?After physical store locations and Web, mobile is the most important sales channel for retailers right now.?

?Retailers have had huge successes in sweepstakes, and scavenger hunts add an element of location and search to sweepstakes. Sweepstakes are now being utilized in social media quite aggressively, and so long as the goal is not a pure product sales push, scavenger hunts in particular are fun and engaging.?

The H&M banner ads

Mr. Gerber is not affiliated with H&M. He commented based on his expertise on the subject.

H&M did not respond to press inquiries.

Snap to win
H&M is using social media and mobile as part of a multichannel rollout of a new ad campaign with David Beckham.

Statues of David Beckham have been placed around New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Consumers who snap a picture of the statue using the Instagram mobile application with the hashtag #HMBeckham are entered to win a $1,000 H&M gift card?and other prizes.

The mobile ads direct to a mobile microsite for the campaign that lets users view where the statues are on a map in their city as well as browse through pictures that are tagged from Instagram. Users can ?Like,? tweet or pin the images directly from the site as well.

Users can find statues through maps

Besides Instagram, users can also follow H&M?s Twitter page or sign up for the brand?s email newsletter for a chance at winning.

Promoting a social-media heavy campaign with mobile advertising is a smart move for H&M because it lets users automatically take an action.

Additionally, mobile traffic to social media sites continues to surge. Facebook recently reported that it had 543 million mobile monthly users by the end of June (see story).

The mobile site pulls in Instagram

Mobile past
H&M is no stranger to running similar mobile ads around time-specific promotions.

Most recently, the retailer used mobile ads inside the Pandora iPhone app to boost in-store sales around new products (see story).

In 2010, H&M worked with GoldRun on a location-based initiative that used augmented reality?to let users virtually try on products from store windows in exchange for?a 10 percent discount that could be redeemed?in-store (see story).

The company does not have a commerce-enabled mobile site, making driving foot traffic the primary goal behind all of H&M?s initiatives.

By encouraging users to find the statues in their cities, some of which are placed inside stores in New York, H&M is able to build hype around a campaign that ultimately gets consumers to shop.

??In the next phase, you?ll see a tighter integration between the social, mobile and location elements of a brand to provide a more enriching experience for the consumer,??Mr. Gerber said.

?This will happen through experimentation and building out integrated programs on a block-by-block strategy, versus a sweeping change to how retailers allocate their marketing budgets," he said. "You?ll also see measurement done along the way to measure campaign ROI and effectiveness.?

Final Take
Lauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Marketer, New York

Lauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Marketer. Reach her at lauren@mobilemarketer.com.

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Exploring the relationship between multi-morbidity, resilience and social connectedness across the lifecourse

Impact Factor:1.137 | Ranking:21/36 in Social Sciences, Biomedical | 81/136 in Public, Environmental & Occupational Health | 5-Year Impact Factor:1.396Source:2012 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2013)
Multi-morbidity is receiving considerable attention in public policy, health and social care. From the perspective of the individual, multi-morbidity is a more complex experience than solely having a clinical diagnosis. In this article, we will argue that understanding multi-morbidity can be facilitated by considering the relationship between adversity (in this case multi-morbidity), resilience and social connectedness within a life course framework. This provides an approach that can capture the dynamics of social relationships, social connectedness and the fluctuations in the experience of multi-morbidity. We draw on a qualitative study of 17 people who have multiple conditions, but consider themselves as being able to maintain a sense of identity and self over time and in the face of adversity. From their accounts, a more varied picture emerges of living with multi-morbidity. This then depicts a more realistic representation of how each person shapes their multi-morbidity and resilient responses within their own social context, which can help to formulate more effective ways of supporting them.

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Student Social Climbing, but on an Indoor Bike

“They’ve been one of the greatest social events of my year,” Ms. Rosuck, 19, said of the spin classes, which she calls “a party on a bike.”

Ms. Rosuck, who says that she arrives 15 minutes early to hang out and that most students do the same, added, “It’s nice because it’s a place to go where people are concerned about having a healthy mind and body rather than just drinking all the time.”

Cyc, which promotes itself as the place to have “a social active life,” is hardly the first boutique fitness company to tout its festive atmosphere. But the brand, which opened studios last fall in Austin and at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is the first to explicitly target college students, a demographic more traditionally associated with sleeping through a class than sweating through one. Three more studios are scheduled to open in the next nine months, including one near New York University, said Cyc’s chief executive, Stephen Nitkin.

Mr. Nitkin, a founder of Marquis Jet, a private jet access card company (since acquired by Warren Buffett’s NetJets), said students today are more health conscious and sophisticated, and may have parents who spin. The moment that inspired Mr. Nitkin to start Cyc is telling: when an influx of college students on winter break in 2011 locked him and his friends out of their favorite Manhattan spin classes. 

Still, Jared Shrode, 31, who rides his bike in Austin, said he was surprised by the student turnout, especially in the early morning. In January, when Cyc ran a two-week “10,000-calorie challenge” that required participants to attend near-daily classes at 7 a.m. in Austin and 8 a.m. in Madison, the company sold out of slots. Sixty percent of Austin’s challenge riders were students; 100 percent of Madison’s were, according to company figures.

Mr. Shrode, who works in sales for a technology company, said: “Nobody I knew in college got up in the morning and tried to work off a hangover like some of these guys do. Paying for exercise was something I never considered. We’d just go and play basketball.”

Classes for students cost some $17 each, not exactly budget friendly. “That’s almost three six-packs of beer,” said Alexander Kowalsky, 22, who opted for spin classes at Wisconsin’s free campus gyms. But Mr. Kowalsky, who graduated last month (and, for the record, is not a big drinker), said he could understand the company’s appeal to wealthy students who don’t want to wait to use equipment at peak times. All the Cyc student customers interviewed said their parents paid for their cycling habit. Prices will be about $18 for students in Manhattan; similar classes at other studios (most of which don’t offer student discounts in New York City) cost about $30.

In the land of cheap beer and free T-shirts, it seems students will pay (or ask their parents to pay) for a hard-core workout, and instructors perceived as toughest are the most popular, Mr. Nitkin said. There is no exercise equivalent of an easy A; all of Cyc’s classes are intense, he said. Keoni Hudoba, an opera singer turned fitness expert (he shrank himself from 327 pounds to 180), created the 45-minute session that features a wider range of arm moves than is found at most cycling studios. Riders use hand-held beanbag weights for more than half of the roughly 15 songs, compared with the standard one, two or three songs.

“We’re not about burning candles, we’re about burning calories,” Mr. Nitkin said.

Grapefruit-scented candles are a hallmark of the popular SoulCycle chain. A SoulCycle spokeswoman declined to comment.

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