5 Examples of ‘Phigital’ Marketing Campaigns and Their Benefits

Brands typically prefer to separate the mediums for their physical and digital marketing campaigns to save costs and easily control what messages are distributed on each platform. Digital marketing also includes a wide range of unique tools and services that are difficult to integrate into the physical medium.

However, going “phigital” (physical + digital) can be an attractive proposition for businesses looking to arouse consumer interest, generate more buzz and capture attention from valuable sales leads. If you are unfamiliar with this concept and how it could be applied in real-life marketing, this article lists five examples of phigital marketing campaigns and discusses their benefits.

1. Coca-Cola: Gathering Marketing Data

The Coca-Cola Freestyle app is a great example of a phigital campaign done right. The app focuses on the following features.

● Each app is able to connect to a special Coca-Cola Freestyle machine using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

● The customer is able to combine unique Coca-Cola flavours using the app.

● Upon receiving the customer’s request, the machine pours a glass of Coca-Cola containing exactly the flavours that the customer had ordered.

On paper, the Freestyle campaign benefits Coca-Cola by increasing their consumers’ awareness of lesser-known Cola flavours such as fruit punch or grape. Coca-Cola, however, complements this by gathering detailed statistics of each users’ preferred flavours. This data is used to plan production and ensure that Coca-Cola is able to easily fill unique niches (e.g., targeting fans of vanilla soft drinks) in the beverage market.

2. McDonald’s: Increasing Sales through Discounts

Similarly to Coca-Cola, McDonald’s used a combination of a physical object (in this case, a large billboard in Stockholm) and a mobile app to design a creative phigital campaign. The details of this campaign are slightly different from the example of Coca-Cola.

● Each user of the McDonald’s app is able to play a game on a large-scale billboard located in downtown Stockholm.

● The winners receive McDonald’s merchandise and discounts for their future purchases at nearby McDonald’s restaurants.

In a lot of cases, sharing promotional coupons among the target audience can be problematic. If your coupons are physical, the customers can lose their flyers and brochures and have less of an incentive to repeat their purchases. If your coupons are digital, they are only available to the visitors of your website or your social media followers.

McDonald’s was able to successfully address these obstacles by combining a very visible physical element (a billboard) with digital promo codes and discounts. This ensured that nearly all residents of downtown Stockholm were incentivised to download McDonald’s promotional app.

3. Audi: Helping Customers to Evaluate Products

Communicating product features and other details to the end consumers is a major pain for digital marketers. To attract consumer interest, marketers need to create and share valuable content by using blog posting services, distribute informative videos or create interactive marketing platforms (e.g. interactive infographics). Audi, on the other hand, successfully used a phigital campaign to easily inform its customers of all the relevant features of their cars.

Specifically, the firm’s showroom in London includes large-scale displays that are connected to nearby touchscreens. The touchscreens are provided with Audi’s own app, allowing the customers to select what cars they want to review in more detail. Once the visitor of Audi’s physical space makes their choice, a 3D model of the relevant car is shown on the large-scale displays.

This allows the customers to review not only the performance of Audi’s cars but how their cars look from angles that are normally impossible to achieve in the context of a normal physical showroom. While it is unknown whether Audi has gained more sales as a result of this campaign, the brand’s phigital campaign is certainly a very impressive piece of technology.

4. Reformation: Boosting the Appeal and Rarity of Luxury

Reformation, a premium brand of women’s apparel, uses a phigital strategy that is similar to Audi’s approach. Each Reformation store includes a large touchscreen display allowing the users to access Reformation’s entire catalogue, learn more about the garments offered by the brand or even see how Reformation’s clothes look like in a 3D virtual environment. Reformation differs from all other brick-and-mortar apparel retailers in that these touchscreens represent the primary method of connecting customers to their products. Reformation’s stores traditionally do not include a large selection of physical clothes and very rarely use mannequins to display apparel.

Because of its unique phigital strategy, Reformation carefully highlights the uniqueness of its products. The lack of physical apparel boosts the rarity of the brand’s clothing and allows its staff to focus their attention on the customers instead of re-stocking the inventory or cleaning the store.

5. Glossier: Improving Customer Experiences

Glossier is a premium brand of skincare products and cosmetics. The company primarily uses phigital marketing to provide superior customer experience while communicating the image of a fun luxury brand. Each brick-and-mortar store of Glossier limits the number of customers who are allowed in by the staff. This is done so that each customer inside the storeroom has ample time to try out Glossier’s products, talk with the salespeople and, last but not least, talk about their experiences on social media (e.g., by posting selfies on Instagram).

Glossier’s marketing strategy is unique in that its digital part is driven entirely by the customers who can use Glossier’s products to create new social media content. Because of this, Glossier not only provides an experience that is arguably superior to all other physical cosmetics retailers but also effectively targets prominent social media users such as beauty influencers on Instagram and TikTok.

While creating a solid phigital campaign can involve higher costs than simply separating physical and digital marketing, this unique area of marketing is highly effective in reaching the targeted audiences, gathering marketing data and raising the appeal of your brand. We hope that the above examples inspire you to engage in phigital campaigns of your own and leverage your creativity to improve your business’ competitive position.