AW LAB Club: new superpowers into customer's hands

AW LAB asked IQUII to amplify and improve the impact of its brand experience through a new tool dedicated to the AW LAB Lovers, able to emotionally involve customers and the brand enthusiasts.

“Playing is a serious thing, just do it with style”. This is the philosophy which lays behind the partnership between IQUII and AW LAB and underlies AW LAB Club project, the mobile app that enables a more fluent and direct conversation between brand and customer through both online and offline gamification logics to create new opportunities of data acquisition and customer retention for the company.

AW LAB Club is the digital solution designed and developed by IQUII for AW LAB which is entirely dedicated to young people under 30 in love with urban-style fashion. It aims to make the interactions before and after the purchase a real human-centred experience where the customer becomes protagonist of a hybrid world comprising physical and digital elements strictly connected to inform, engage and retain as well as to create a prospect’s unique identikit. It is a tool which can connect information spread out on different touchpoints owned by the brand.

To design an effective strategy and make users aware of the AW LAB’s real value, a study on user’s interests has been conducted. We analysed passions, desires and needs which drive customer’s purchase in order to shape and design an environment in line with the final customers’ habits and brand’s communication principles. From the layout to tone of voice, everything has been created to follow the natural trend of the AW LAB’s public: texts are friendly and informal while the colors are trendy and vibrant, just as urban-style that is the distinctive trait of the brand values and the essence of the final customer.

The app features, which enable a dialogue between brand and client, come from the analysis of the AW LAB’s customers purchasing behaviour and habits . For example the store locator is a geolocalized map which allows the user to detect the nearest shops. There’s also a direct access to the e-commerce, to purchase directly through the smartphone. Moreover, the app tells the stories of the brands which AW LAB hosts in store in order to position it more like a media through an entire section dedicated to information on the latest sneaker collections available and other news.

And if these features are useful to activate the user at time others than purchase, gamification is the incentive that emotionally involves it playing a leading role inside the project.

AW LAB Club has been designed to recognize and reward the customers with a loyalty program which assigns points not only after the purchase but also during all the customer journey, enabling virtuous circle of actions able to create the desire to relive the experience again and again, no matter if they want to purchase a product or not.

The gamification of AW LAB Club is based on Fanize, the Loyalty & Fan Engagement platform developed by IQUII, which assigns missions e rewards strategically planned for customers through engagement mechanics. Among the several actions dedicated to the AW LAB Lovers, there are:

• instant win, live quiz and survey on AW LAB partners (Nike, Puma, Adidas…);
• proximity interactions;
• social actions, share and download of contents about AW LAB’s world;
• QR code;

The initiative which most involves the customers is the Sneakers Hunt, the treasure hunt in augmented reality like Pokemon Go, extended throughout the national territory, that leads all the sneakers enthusiasts to track down hidden virtual objects in their city and catch them with the smartphone to win exclusive and high quality models.

The gamification lever designed for the Sneaker Hunt is opposite to that of the majority of video games offer. Indeed, the setting of the game is not a “parallel world”, but the real one enriched with additional elements, by the combination of physical and digital experience into an immersive and original model of engagement, in which the user is the protagonist of a hybrid world involving the use of mind and body. Furthermore, the initiative allows AW LAB to increase the collaborations with partner brands, by the integration of the logos of individual firms such as pins and objects to be captured along the streets and in the stores, or by creating games entirely dedicated to the brand and hosted within the app.

AW Lab Club is available on every iOS and Android device. An Angular and NodeJS Middleware software has been realized to communicate with the applications through an API and a backend for the management of CMS and the analytics, that provides all the information of the digital touchpoints in order to give back complete and integrated user data.

The Middleware integrates with AW LAB’s CRM and allows to improve the management of information between company systems, without any impact on the consolidated working method. At the same time, it allows also an optimization of the processes, in order to ensure a unique and synchronous system to be in line with the company path, aimed to a perfect omnichannel and efficiency.

AW LAB takes a step forward in engaging the customer, adopting new logics of gamification, augmented reality and constant interactions. Thanks to the use of a platform able to connect the brand with the real needs of the final customer, AW LAB can now obtain all the necessary information to offer a memorable and more tailored service for the user.