Linksys has been making Wi-Fi products for decades, but in recent years, it has been facing some challenges due to slipping sales. This prompted Linksys to come up with an innovative strategy to influence the people whom consumers turned to when looking to buy a new Wi-Fi system: trusted employees.
Objective and Context:
The American household is more connected than ever. Today, an average household has 10 to 12 devices, all of which are often simultaneously connected to Wi-Fi. While Linksys has been developing Wi-Fi solutions for almost as long as the internet has been around, the brand’s legacy alone was not capturing the interest of customers. Sales were slumping at a major retailer that accounted for nearly 26 percent of consumer sales. The source of the sales slump was largely because Linksys products were being forgotten about on the shelves. Linksys needed to remind retailers about the benefits of the brand’s Wi-Fi products and re-empower their employees to feel confident when recommending Linksys products to their customers.
Target Audience:
For most people, shopping for a Wi-Fi system is intimidating. Linksys discovered that confused and overwhelmed customers often turned to a retailer’s trusted employees for help. Linksys had to find a way to sway these in-store influencers, which required more than a standard demo-based targeting approach. Instead, the brand needed to take a hyper-targeted, location-based mobile approach to reach and influence these tech-savvy employees.
Creative Strategy:
The campaign ran across 1,500 store locations across the U.S. Given that the campaign needed to not only establish top-of-mind awareness but also drive brand preference with Linksys, the creative needed to deliver an interactive, memorable experience that would capture the interest and engagement of the tech-savvy employee. Within the mobile display experience, it carefully placed interactive hot spots to educate these employees about the core benefits and features of Linksys’s Wi-Fi products. But to truly drive brand preference, Linksys needed to establish trust by speaking their language. Therefore, the messaging was infused with high-tech terminology.
Overall Campaign Execution:
The Linksys mobile campaign delivered an immersive product experience to educate employees of a large major electronics retail store on the features and benefits of Linksys Wi-Fi solutions. The need for accuracy was critical, so a “virtual perimeter” was established to reach people who were visiting the retailer’s store. But simply geo-fencing the store wasn’t enough to reach the brand’s audience; it needed a way to decipher who was a customer and an employee. Linksys observed that a distinct differentiator between customers and employees was the number of times they visited the store. Employees typically have several shifts throughout the week and come in and out of the store for breaks during their shift. To ensure that it was reaching this specific audience, the brand overlaid its location data with the retailer’s visitation trend data. The mobile campaign was able to identify and reach almost all of the retailer’s employees across the country.
Mobile Execution:
Linksys had to design a proximity-based mobile display campaign that geo-fenced a narrow radius around each store, giving the brand insight about the visiting patterns of each store. From this data, it constructed a logic gate that would only serve the mobile display campaign to those whose visit patterns indicated they were an employee.
Linksys’s hyper-local mobile campaign was one of the most successful campaigns in the history of the company. Before launch, the brand was at risk of losing its leading positioning in the market. After just six weeks in market, the campaign set unprecedented results within the technology industry. The brand reached an 80 percent penetration among its target audience. Employees were deeply immersed in the campaign, spending an average of almost 50 seconds within the mobile ad experience, an astonishing 400 percent above the tech industry’s time-spent benchmark. Not only did the campaign capture the attention of these employees, it also drove powerful product engagement that was 200 percent above industry benchmarks for all geo-fenced mobile campaigns. The campaign also had a powerful impact within the Wi-Fi market. The Linksys campaign contributed to an impressive 10 percent year-over-year sales growth.