Brand Matters : Marketing With a Pop

Take a page from major retail brands and learn the art of the pop-up

Here’s a pop quiz.

Question: What do Procter & Gamble, EBay, Bride’s magazine, Target, JCPenney, Borders, Reebok, Manolo Blahnik, Levi Strauss, Harry & David, Toys“R”Us, Cartier and Gucci all have in common?

Answer: They all have used the latest brand marketing tool to both connect with their existing customers and find new customers: pop-up stores!

Christina Norsig, CEO of New York-based Pop-Up Insider, describes pop-up stores as, “temporary retail space used for generating sales and marketing brands; a solution to the economic challenges facing both landlords
and retailers.”

In an interview on American Public Media, Norsig stated: “It’s what I call bricks, clicks and quicks. We have our brick-and-mortar stores, we have our Internet business, and now we have quicks, meaning temporary real estate.”

Pop-up stores have reignited the retail world because of several factors. These stores:

• create buzz and excitement;
• build anticipation and provoke attention in cluttered environments;
• provide a fast and extremely convenient call to action;
• build brand loyalty by providing interactive and novel customer experiences; and
• inspire long-lasting customer conversations.

I do believe in the power of the pop-up effect, but I believe the idea may have far wider-reaching implications. I’ve used the marketing concept of pop-ups as a tool to help companies in all sorts of industries—not just retail—think about how their brands can learn from these experiences and simulate the effects of these pop-upesque opportunities.