360 degree experience
Nike know a fair bit about branded experiences. My new iPhone came with Nike + pre-installed. Usually this would not be relavent to me, my default setting being couch-potato. But for one reason or another I’m currently training, in less than a months time I’ll be punishing my body in water, bike and road, attempting to complete the London Triathlon. So Nike+ got me curious. To get it to work you need a sensor, so I took a trip down to the Nike Store in Covent Garden and bought myself a Nike+ sensor. The sales assistant (after failing to cross sell me a pair of trainers for the sensor), showed me the bottom of my receipt. “Look!” she said as she highlighted £250. “You could win some cash by going to this website”, (circling the URL in the text).
Sometime later and I entered the URL (rather long and cumbersome) and landed on a page asking me to enter the receipt number. This presented me with a satisfaction survey on my store experience to complete. The system was not intelligent enough to know what product I had bought, and there would be little for me to gain by being presented that information at this point. At the end of the survey they invited me to enter my email address to enter a prize draw. With this simple process they have linked an anonymous purchase of a known product with an email address. An email address has value ; using a tools such as Flowtown from my social network activity they could start building a richer picture of me, including the extent to which I am connected and am an influencer.
The supermarkets have used till receipts for marketing (e.g. Tesco clubcard points) for a while. But if you do not have an explicit point of sale loyalty scheme, this is an innovative way of connecting the offline purchase experience with an on-going on-line relationship. Of course Nike go well beyond this. From the iPhone app that was already installed, through to purchasing the Nike+ sensor, I now have a Nike account where I can track my running progress, uploading my training times after each run. That really is a 360 degree experience.
I am not sure whether you are commending them for not having an intelligent system or not. Offline URL, cumbersome survey and an email later, all you get to do is enter a prize draw.
The point is.. they could have lost you at any point during the process. So how does this make for a 360 degrees experience?
I am leaning more towards individual stories such as http://www.itizen.com. Imagine being able to have a story associated with every item even if its as mundane as “Mr. Wu, a 36 year old Chinese worker packaged this sensor in Nike’s factory in Xian on 15th September 2007 ” etc. That would tempt you to add your own story to it making it a richer interaction with the product and the seller.