Hanging Its Hopes
Best Buy is testing oversize door hangers to promote its Reward Zone customer loyalty program.
A 500,000-piece trial began in April in Minneapolis (the electronics retailer’s headquarters), Boston, Indianapolis, New York and Phoenix to advertise the loyalty card, says Bill Borneman, CEO of Power Direct, the door-hanger medium’s developer.
This effort comes on the heels of similar 100,000-piece tryouts in March for Best Buy’s Geek Squad computer support service in San Jose, CA and Madison, WI. This “task force” of electronic technicians visits customers’ homes to hook up their new equipment and answer any questions they might have.
“First [Best Buy] used the door hangers for a specific service and now it’s using them for its core advertising,” Borneman says. For these campaigns, Best Buy mined geo-demographic lists of likely customers within given neighborhoods. The retailer ran the Claritas Ixpress and Prizm NE systems to isolate such characteristics as ethnicity, age and income ranges, he adds.
Newport Beach, CA-based Power Direct’s door hangers offer audited national distribution and post-campaign analysis. They also come with scratch-off or perforated response cards and can have bar codes attached to track individual purchasing behavior.
Best Buy’s 5-1/2-by-17-inch pieces are printed on heavy blue stock and carry the headline, “Free One-Year Reward Zone Program Membership,” in bold yellow type. At the bottom is a detachable card that’s redeemable at a store for a free one-year club membership. Reward points, discounts and a $5 certificate toward future purchases are some of the program’s perks.
The test’s budget was between $180 and $350 per 1,000 pieces.
At press time, results had not been determined and Best Buy did not indicate whether it will expand use of the medium.
