BIRKENSTOCK

Cinarra was used for a campaign to attract customers to the store of the footwear brand “BIRKENSTOCK”. Ms. Yuki Akinaga, PR and Digital Marketing Leader at Benexy, Inc. was in charge of the implementation. We asked her about the challenges she faced and her impressions of using Cinarra.

Can you tell us about your company’s business and your team’s responsibilities?

Akinaga: Benexie Co., Ltd. (hereinafter Benexie) is the only franchise operator in Japan for the German footwear brand “BIRKENSTOCK”. We operate and promote 70 stores throughout Japan.

Among them, I play two roles centered on web marketing.

One is the operation of our membership service “FitClub”, which distributes e-mail newsletters and plans and announces campaigns limited to members.

The other is planning and announcing campaigns that encourage customers to attract customers to physical stores. For example, we are planning a campaign to present original tote bags to customers who purchase them, and we are announcing them through various media such as web advertisements. I was looking for a new way to collect data in order to measure the effectiveness of the campaign advertisement and connect it to the next measure.

Please tell us about the problems you had in your work.

Akinaga: The challenge was that we couldn’t keep track of whether the customers who saw the web advertisement actually visited the store. BIRKENSTOCK has strengths in fitting in physical stores, so there are overwhelmingly more customers who purchase in physical stores than online. Knowing whether a visitor has been attracted by web advertising is a very important indicator for marketing.

I was also involved in web marketing at my previous job. I felt that it was difficult to analyze the number of store visits (store visit conversions) via digital advertising in stores, whereas the PDCA cycle can be applied to online conversions.

I knew there were store visit measurement tools, but most of them are services that utilize GPS and Bluetooth. GPS has low measurement accuracy inside the building and is not suitable for measuring stores in malls. In addition, Bluetooth requires a dedicated application DL on the customer side. Therefore, there were concerns about each measurement method. I met Cinarra when I was thinking that I couldn’t get the data I wanted with the current technology.

“Highly accurate store visit measurement using Wi-Fi and high safety are the decisive factors”

Thank you. What did you find appealing about Cinarra?

Akinaga: I was fascinated by the high accuracy of store visit measurement. Since Cinarra uses Wi-Fi equipment, it is possible to measure by store or floor in the building. For us, which has many stores in shopping malls, it was important to be able to identify the floor.

Also, because it works with major mobile carriers, I was fascinated by the large number of users who connect to Wi-Fi for data acquisition.

In addition, it was also attractive to have a system that considers the protection of personal information. At the time of introduction, there was a concern from the management side of the shopping mall that the personal information of customers who visited the store might be leaked.

However, we told them that Cinarra does not collect personal data and that the analysis data will be provided by the telecommunication carrier in a form that does not identify the individual, and as a result, the shopping mall operators were reassured.

What kind of results did you obtain after running the RealPeople ad serving service and the RealSight service for measuring visits to other media for one month?

Akinaga: We run a variety of campaigns. From the results of this campaign, we were able to back up the campaigns that we had assumed to be effective based on sales with actual data.

The data also comes out at a granular level by media and store, which is necessary for analysis, so I feel that it will be very useful when planning the next campaign. Since the characteristics of each store differ greatly, such as between mall stores and street stores, we were very grateful for the detailed data. It has been well received within the company as well.

“Cinarra’s unique segment enables customer trend analysis”

As a result of publishing by store, different data came out for each store or region. The other day, I submitted a report of the analysis results. Can you tell us what you think?

Akinaga: The analysis using Cinarra’s unique segment was very interesting.

At Cinara, persona segments are created according to the user’s location information detection pattern, and visitors can be analyzed.

Akinaga: I was very interested in the analysis using Cinarra’s unique segments. Cinarra creates persona segments according to the location detection patterns of users, which allows us to analyze the people who visit our stores. As a result of analyzing the users who visited our store, we found that most of our customers are “highly interested in clothing, jewelry, and cosmetics,” and the results do not deviate much from the personas that we thought were in the volume zone. On the other hand, when we analyzed the results with Demographic, we found that there was a discrepancy with the demographic we thought was highly motivated to buy, so we are going to reconsider how to appeal to them in the future.

Please tell us your future prospects.

Akinaga: First of all, we would like to continue to use “RealPeople” and “RealSight” to measure store visits by medium and store, while utilizing Cinarra’s unique segment to understand customer trends. I think we can select advertising media and brush up our creativity.

As the next step, we would like to use “VitalSight” to see which pages on our membership site “FitClub” make users more likely to visit the store. By analyzing which web content motivates people to buy and which leads them to visit the store, we will be able to market our company more effectively and provide more enjoyable content for our customers.

We will continue to support analysis, so I hope you will continue to use it. Finally, do you have a message for those who are considering Cinarra’s solution?

Akinaga: In recent years, it seems that many advertisers are shifting their advertising destinations from magazines to the Web. I think we are moving from magazines where it is difficult to measure the effects to the Web where results are obtained numerically.

However, most of the web advertising is limited to online performance indicators. I think Cinarra’s solution is perfect to capture the number of store visits that are important for companies with stores. If we can back up the results of our measures with store visit measurements, we will be able to make more logical decisions about promotion strategies that we have been pursuing without confidence, and we will also be able to make decisions about which media to use