retail

Gap Goes Social To Fuel Digital Engagement

Gap-

Discovery, engagement and advocacy. Those three themes help marketers at Gap get a handle on how the brand talks to consumers and vice versa on social media. Chris Gayton, the San Francisco apparel retailer's senior director of marketing, and Summer Riley, Gap's director of customer relationship management, spoke about how these three foci are also helping to direct the company's digital efforts at the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) conference on social and digital media in New York on Thursday.

Gayton, who came to Gap from the auto sector, knows how consumers -- armed with information from the likes of Edmunds.com -- come to the dealership well-prepared and likely to know in advance which vehicle they wanted and at what price. He said the same rule holds true in the apparel sector. "People are doing their pre-shopping, looking at Web coupons, circulars, ratings and reviews, friends' suggestions, emails, etc., and they are doing that not only on computers, but when they are in stores, as well. They are using cell phones and mobile devices to check reviews, to Yelp, get coupons, post reviews, and talk smack about the experiences they have just had with sales people."

Gayton said advocacy means making sites like Facebook an open market for ideas. When the company launched skinny jeans for men, the social site became a forum. "We had hundreds of people saying men in skinny jeans is the worst thing they could ever imagine," said Gayton, who recalls one woman writing: "Our forefathers would be rolling in their graves." That tactic includes making Gap's social platforms a press site as well, such as when Michelle Obama wore a Gap dress tunic fashion over pants. "People talked about it. One woman said Gap shouldn't advocate for a president and First Lady "whom I loathe." The response was: "Really, people, let's not alienate Gap because someone shops there."

In part because of the low cost of working in social, ROI is high, according to the marketer. "[Such efforts] have increased traffic and the size of orders, because engaged customers spend more," he said.

The company has also made social a coupon platform, using its Facebook page to offer fans 40%-off coupons. "We are doing things that have traditionally been done through traditional media," said Riley. The company last year ran a "Want" campaign, partnering with celebrities who talked in Facebook videos about what they wanted for the holiday season. "We got one million views," said Riley, "and 250,000 new fans."

This fall, Gap will run a program that ties print media to social in the September issue of Glamour. The retailer, one of 20 advertisers in the issue, will have a Facebook icon embedded in its ad that will allow readers to use a Glamour digital app to scan it, launching Gap's mobile Facebook page. People who then "like" the page get a 40% off deal. "This is an example of where we are trying to use a base of traditional media to drive social," said Riley.

Riley and a teammate at Gap came up with the largest national Groupon tie-in ever when they were heading to a frozen yogurt shop in San Francisco to redeem a coupon. The experience brought up the problem of how to use social to drive local traffic to local stores. "How do we do that when have 850 Gap stores? We realized we could use Groupon to deliver local deals to specific stores," says Riley.

That changed when the company reached out to Groupon, emailing a query to its generic email address. Two days later it was in discussions for a local-level program. That led to a national Groupon deal last fall aligned with the launch of Gap's new black pants. "The Groupon site crashed within an hour," said Riley. "We were selling 10 Groupons per second -- 435,000 that day."

The company's new digital partnership, with Swagg, features a free app with geotargeted offers and mobile gift cards that allow consumers to buy, trade or redeem mobile gift cards or store existing gift cards in digital form. "They can upload it to Swagg so they don't have to carry plastic pieces," says Gayton. The program, which launched in May, will get a new promotional boost in August.

Next story loading loading..