Foreign Retailers
One option for companies to market products abroad has been to create "pop-up shops" that allow them to sell their products in areas of heavy foot traffic, such as in busy streets or outside popular venues. Read this chapter to see how this setup can work from a financial standpoint.
Pop-up shops have also been implemented as an event marketing tool to build brand reputation and brand community. In this case, pop-up retail is usually a part of a big ticket campaign for the brand. Pop-up shops, as a form of event marketing, can create a temporary branded environment and serve as a vehicle for non-conventional communication.
Example
In celebration of National Chocolate Day in July 2017, Hershey's ran a 10-day Chipits Bake Bar pop-up in Toronto, where people could design their own free cookies with dough and toppings of their choice. To add a social cause to the celebration, Chipits donated a meal to the Daily Bread Food Bank for every pack of cookies distributed.
In general, event marketing is implemented by companies to achieve multi-faceted objectives.
- Corporate objectives: help to increase public awareness, enhance corporate image and promote community involvement
- Marketing objectives: help to reach out to target markets, communicate brand positioning and increase sales
- Media objectives: help to generate visibility and publicity, counter negative publicity and reinforce ad campaigns
- Personal objectives: help to fulfill management interest
Research suggests that people's event attendance positively affects their perceived brand equity. In the case of pop-up shops, brand experience is stronger among all forms of event marketing tested (including sponsored events, trade shows, street events and pop-up shops), and brand experience mediates the relationship between pre-event and post-event brand equity. In other words, after visiting pop-up shops, the post-event brand equity is higher than it was pre-event.