Isn’t this brilliant? I thought so. It’s from a few months back now but no they aren’t a client, lets get that out of the way first.

To announce and promote their customer loyalty programme Sprize, the GAP store  in Vancouver, BC completely flipped everything upside down and adhering to their tagline rather nicely of turning shopping on its head. This I like.  So all of the mannequins, displays and signs were flipped, as well as some cars and a hot dog stand outside of the store. Brilliant.

It seems to me like a clever customer retention tool and keeping those existing customers happy. I think its only open in Canada at the moment but they can sign up for a free Sprize account at participating Gap stores for an opportunity to collect SprizeMoney. Put simply, if you buy a shirt at £25 and within 45 days it goes down in price then you get credited to your account the difference. Now thats something I’d sign up to for sure. Isn’t it annoying when you buy something full price for it to be discounted some weeks later?

This is smart because the idea / hope is that people will return to GAP more often to see what they can get for their Sprizemoney and undoubtedly pick up a few more purchases than they had intended. Potentially increasing footfall and volume of purchases.

Nice.

Via PSFK and Suite 101

It seems like the car co’s are really stepping up their game recently with great stuff like this and the stunt Mini pulled off in Amsterdam which I wrote about recently here. I love this. It’s brilliant, unexpected, ambient and I’d imagine a wow moment when you see it in the flesh. It wasn’t the kind of thing I’d expect Alfa Romeo to be doing and that’s always a good thing.

So Alfa Romeo Belgium have been unconventionally taking one of their cars to shopping centres in Belgium to demonstrate just how easy it is to buy. The ambient stunt, associated with the Salon de l’Auto et de la Moto de Bruxelles (14 to 24 January), incredibly suspends the car to make it fit into a shopping trolley. Genius.

The tag line, “Your chance to own an Alfa Romeo” is a bit dull though. It doesn’t really motivate me enough. How about “Put an Alfa Romeo in your shopping trolley today!” Too long? Oh well.

Pictures below were taken in Woluwé Shopping Centre and will soon be replicated in other shopping centres in Antwerp and Liege.

A rather wonderfully executed guerilla campaign by Mini Amsterdam featuring packing boxes in prominent locations around Amsterdam. They are promoting something that you probably wouldn’t know about or be interested in but this brings in to the forefront, a 99€ a month finance deal which is available on the Mini Cooper. Taking a fairly run of the mill offer, like a finance plan and making it part of something compelling. Lovely.

Here’s a few images and videos to illustrate.

(and here’s my fave..)

From humble beginnings back in 2002, ASOS, formerly known as As Seen On Screen have become quite the powerhouse in the online fashion world. One person I spoke to about this remarked that it was like the Heat magazine of fashion, always on the pulse of celebrity culture and reasonably inexpensive. I thought ASOS was a bit bigger than Heat as an entity but it was a good analogy. They are, I believe, the largest independent online fashion and beauty retailer. It fits though with the similar type of target, aimed primarily at fashion forward 16-34 year olds, the site attracts approx 5.3 million unique visitors a month with over 2 million registered users.

Here’s a perhaps unknown fact for you, the company was started by the great-grandson of the founder of the one time major UK high street tailor chain Austin Reed. An early indication even, that it was going to be sticking around!

What got me thinking about all this was the eye catching advert in the London Paper tonight (6th July) and the transition from being strictly online only to now doing a few things offline too. The bright colours and really stand out typography meant that you literally couldn’t miss it. I wondered whether ASOS had done something like this before in print or whether it was a first? Apart from their own magazine, I don’t think I’ve seen many other offline print initiatives, granted I may have missed them!

Why now? Well, it would seem that heavy high street discounting and unemployment among younger shoppers is likely to slow the meteoric growth of ASOS according to a recent Retail Week article. “Job insecurity has to be a worry and I suspect that people are holding back.” said the Chief Executive, Nick Robertson.

“Clearly much tougher comparables are being faced and there is now some evidence to suggest that the rate of growth in online sales has begun to moderate.” he continued. Is that the honey moon period over then? Looks like that dreaded R word is only now starting to bite with ASOS, impressive going.

One thing I didn’t know was that they recently secured brands such as Mango and Gap to sell online, rapidly diversifying further along with adding maternity clothes, childrenswear and limited run collections. When the chief exec said back in 2007 that he wanted ASOS to be the Amazon of the fashion world, he looks to be getting his wish and predicting the future with a consummate skill that only Mystic Meg could be proud of.

I wonder, if they ramped up their print productions and went on an assault against your weekly/monthly celeb fashion titles, would things turn full circle and start to cannibalise the Heat’s of the world? Would it even be viable? Not sure they could keep up with the changing of trends if they were to produce the magazine any more frequently.

Will be interesting to see whether this is the start of a prolonged offline campaign to try and pique waning customer spending and if it has the required impact.

I’m not going even going to attempt to call it Twaffiti.. but how much more mainstream is it going to get? Maybe mentioned on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross next? Oh.. wait.. Coincidentally, I’m from Nottingham but it wasn’t me, honest.

So it looks as if they’ve perhaps not won over everyone just yet judging by the followup..  Such a polite way though to voice their disdain!

via Nick Burcher and QuestionMarc

Merry Christmas.

With the snow causing chaos up and down the country, it’s quite fascinating how open people are in showing off the amount of snow in their area.

We’ve seen Will Carling’s garden path, outside the back garden of Phillip Schofield and the view from where they are from a fair few hundred people in London. If you thought that wasn’t enough, people on Twitter are giving out the start of their post code and rating the amount of snow in their area (for example writing a tweet with SE15 10/10 #uksnow means your tweet will be saved here)

Ben Marsh has aggregated all the location based snow tweets in a rather brilliant map here

There’s some amazing pictures on Flickr if you search for london+snow and here’s a selection of newspaper homepages.. (in no particular order)

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So I caught up with Jamie Burke, MD of Brando Digital and blogger at Social Glue the other day, who recently set up the P2PR community. Since launch it has been a runaway success, with active participation from it’s members.

We talked over lunch about all things Online PR, social media, paid for blogging (Chris Brogan) and of course ROI and the almighty echo chamber.

To view the video, click my face.. be nice ! (or alternatively you can click here if you can’t bring yourself to do it!)

There’s a whole host of videos also on the community, all of which can be found here.

As always, interested to hear your thoughts and feedback on the topics discussed. Hopefully you can take something away from it.

I was in Shoreditch earlier on today and was a bit lost to say the least.

I knew I wasn’t far away from where I wanted to be but was confronted with side roads wherever I turned.. this wasn’t going to be a happy ending, put a map in front of me and I turn in to Casper the not so friendly ghost.

For a while I walked around just taking in the sights and surroundings because I had a bit of time on my hands but that got a little tiring pretty quickly..

I found a friendly bus conductor who was stopped at the side having a smoke so I asked him where it was I was looking for.. he sent me in the completely wrong direction so after a while walking I stopped a lovely geeky chap who I thought would find me the way to my mecca.. and that he did.. hey I like to adhere to the geeky stereotype every now and then too you know.. He said he wasn’t entirely sure where it was but time was running out for me.. then he had a cunning plan and came to my rescue through the wonders of Google. Whoever said they were getting all evil!

He whipped out his iPhone and started up the Maps application. Genius I thought, why didn’t I think of that.. In the times I’ve used Google Maps in Milton Keynes it was really unreliable and you couldn’t trust the output so I didn’t tend to use it so much.. right there on the street we were having a bit of iPhone loving and sharing tips on cool apps, iPhone formatted sites etc.. I turned location services on on my iPhone (normally off to conserve batter) and pressed the button in the bottom left hand corner which magically located where I was with a nice flashing blue dot.. I whacked in the post code where I was heading for and it plotted me a line how to get there and directions!

Whereas I’ve had limited success with Google Maps previously, it absolutely was a lifesaver and took me exactly to where I wanted to be along with providing directions. I even had time to scope out where it was and then head back down the road to get a sandwich.. Perfect. It was quite a spectacle as your location updates itself on the map so you can see if you’re taking a wrong turn (which I did a few times just to try it out.. honest guv!) I was pretty impressed all in all.