Designed to amplify its current “Future Shopping” back-to-school campaign, Future Shop ran a live Twitter event last week that saw the brand tweet its followers a custom shopping list filled with suggestions from the retailer to help jump start their career.
The two-hour “#FutureShopping for your Career” event, which took place Aug. 21 and garnered 250,000 impressions, asked students what their future career was, and surprised them by tweeting back a personalized “#FutureShopping list,” containing the user’s Twitter handle, a line of copy written just for them, and an assortment of Future Shop gear. Twitter’s Promoted Tweets unit was used to drive awareness pre-event and five participants won a $1,000 shopping spree at Future Shop post-event.
The brand assembled a team of social media specialists, graphic designers, and copywriters to create personalized #FutureShopping lists for students in real time. The team executed a new image roughly every two minutes; and the event resulted in an 8% engagement rate, about three times higher than usual, said Allen Chen, senior manager of digital marketing at Future Shop.
According to Chen, the goal of “#FutureShopping for your Career” was to “surprise and delight” consumers while demonstrating how Future Shop can help them achieve their goals.
“The strategy here is to really jump start conversations with students about their future before the start of the school year, and obviously positioning our brand as here to help them get ahead with all the amazing products,” he said.
Executed in partnership with John St., Media Experts and Citizen Relations, “Future Shopping” – which uses the tagline “You’re not shopping for back to school. You’re shopping for your future.” – launched July 25 and will run until Sept. 11. Elements include TV, PR, social, digital, out of home and radio.
“This is something we’re going to definitely add to our toolkit and keep polishing the process,” Chen said. “There are also a lot of opportunities where we can help our vendor partners to conduct these events at the time of them launching a product… to create that surge of excitement for their product and for our brand.”
