Challenge: Sprint Retail Digital Signage
Sprint competes in an intensely competitive, ever changing and yet mature industry. In this environment, Sprint is dramatically outspent and needs to make the most out of every marketing dollar spent across 12,000+ Sprint stores. How could Sprint respond to competitive pressures more quickly in store while at the same time improving customer engagement and cutting costs?
The Two West Solution:
We leveraged the Two West WaveMaking process, which is our methodology for winning shoppers through emotion.
- Ripple: Scanning the waters for opportunity.
- Swell: Forming an unstoppable idea.
- Surf: Turning momentum into action.
Ripple: Scanning the waters for opportunity
Two West started by taking a full inventory of all in-store materials, allowing us to identify areas that could best be leveraged for quick response communications. Next, we conducted store audits and observational research, identifying what types of interactions customers had with each touch point. We then supplemented our primary research with secondary research and learning from other cases to identify best practices for in-store communication.
Our research highlighted that the heavy use of in-store printed materials was not helping Sprint's competitiveness; printed materials were found to be:
- Expensive to design, produce and distribute
- Difficult to change quickly
- Very labor intensive in store
In essence, the heavy reliance on printed materials was working to Sprint's competitors' advantage, as they had greater scale and budgets.
Swell: Forming an unstoppable idea
The unstoppable idea was a much greater use of in-store digital materials. Our research provided key insights that would help improve response timing, cut costs and increase customer engagement:
- Greater use of in-store digital display assets could dramatically reduce printing and shipping charges and could be refreshed much faster.
- In-store digital video could also better engage customers if it leveraged best practices (i.e. simple enough to be understood whenever a customer engages during a video’s loop; attention grabbing video; etc.).
Two West worked with Sprint and its digital partners to identify objectives and messaging across digital assets to ensure customer engagement through focused and purposeful content—thereby bringing this greater reliance on digital in-store materials to life.
To minimize distribution costs, Two West partnered with Sprint’s IT team to leverage their existing intranet system to distribute digital content instantaneously to each Sprint retail outlet in the U.S.
Surf: Turning momentum into action
In 2010, Two West’s creative and motion graphics teams developed nearly 60 pieces of three-dimensional and live-action promotional messages for in-store LCD screens. In addition, Two West created and coordinated complementary creative and messaging for the virtual queue, device fixtures, and automatic payment pad. And, we continue to work with Sprint to set objectives, messaging strategy and tone for each launch and promotional window.
The Results
The response has been excellent so far and Sprint and its customers are enjoying a variety of benefits, including:
- Enhanced In-Store Experience — Consumers are now drawn into more timely, relevant and engaging in-store displays.
- Efficiency — Offers and promotions are now in markets weeks earlier than they were before.
- Cost Reduction — The costs of printing and distributing materials was virtually eliminated.