Gap Ad on Groupon.com
With the promise of free jeans, Gap has become the latest in corporations to look to social networking tools in order to reach an online community rapidly expanding in population. Within the past six months, Gap has been experiencing a decline in sales, and it hopes to counteract this by offering 10,000 pairs of free jeans to people who attend Gap’s give-away event on Facebook.
Customers who aren’t able to receive a pair of jeans are instead offered an alternate deal: a 40% coupon for any piece of merchandise in the store. Gap has offered such a coupon but only on an in-store basis, and it has only just recently begun to switch to tools like Facebook, Groupon.com, and Foursquare to unveil incentives: a sure-fire way to cause queues to form out the door of Gap stores.
The use of social media results in partnering two key aspects for the financial success of a company: management-information systems and market research. By streamlining the technology utilized by a business in promoting its products, the MIS division opens up a gold-mine of resources for marketing by encouraging the generation of customer feedback and amplifying the word-of-mouth effect to levels previously unreached. In turn, the information gleaned from market research will assist MIS in pinpointing how to enhance the flow of communication, increase innovation in product design, and cut down the supply chain to eliminate operational costs.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/11/05/gap-turns-to-social-media-to-draw-shoppers/
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