Sears Arrive Lounge

Recognizing that the Sears brand was not viewed as very relevant by teens, tweens and college students, telling them that Sears was cool would fall on deaf ears. So Sears instead told their story via relevant content from Vanessa Hudgens and MTV's The American Mall. Insight into the social technographics of these audiences, driven by the POST methodology, lead us create something other than Sears.com A place where teens & tweens could engage in social sampling, and make the campaign their own. A community manager was dedicated to social surfaces on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, blogs and beyond. Serving as a brand advocate, engaging with the audience on social surfaces, driving the conversation about Sears fashions and helping kids get ready to go back to school.

The "Spitball" and "Fashion Fits" facebook apps brought in friends from the users own network to take part in the fun. Friends even received notifications when they got hit with a spitball or got pegged via their friend feed. Short description of business or non-profit goals: AdAge called it, "the coolest digital destination for kids this fall," but more importantly, Arrive Lounge has had made the Sears brand relevant to teens and tweens again. Content distributed across 15 sharing sites has generated over 1,500 comments, with overwhelmingly positive sentiment for Sears. Video viewership has grown at an average of 42% per week, without an increase in media spending.

The Facebook page has seen friending grow at an average of 120% per week, leaving Sears with 44% more friends than the competitor's page. Each of the thousands of application interactions further spreads the message as on average a half dozen messages are sent with every game session. Links back to the Sears.com site have been driving traffic, enabling contextual commerce, yielding recommendation and driving purchase intent from a fresh and influential audience.

Now instead of trying to be cool, Sears talks with the influencers in a cool way. Dates application was available: June 2008 to present