Fashion shopping aggregator Stylight used a new feature on the Shazam app to stage a takeover of a fashion magazine, turning a print medium into a digital shopping experience. This case study looks at how the campaign let the brand to demonstrate its offerings, creating hundreds of direct sales opportunities, and reached thousands of fashion lovers in Germany.
Case study summary
• Shopping site Stylight lets readers buy any item in a magazine via Shazam visual app
• Marketing team scanned every page with fashion items that could be purchased, creating matching product pages with Stylight URLs for every item
• Campaign resulted in more than 20,000 scans, with an average conversion rate of 38%
The challenge
Stylight is an online shopping platform where users can conveniently search for items from thousands of brands and shops in one place. Even though there is no other fashion service like it, Stylight is still relatively unknown. To promote the brand to female fashion lovers in Germany, the brand's goal was to allow them to experience the benefits of using Stylight in a relevant, surprising, and exciting way.
For this campaign, Stylight targeted female fashion lovers between the ages of 18 and 39 who were avid smartphone users. In addition, research showed that about 90 percent of this group had the Shazam app installed on their smartphones, which was crucial to the campaign's mobile execution.
Magazines are still a major source of inspiration for fashion lovers, but searching online for items that are in print is a complicated activity. Stylight decided to solve this problem by turning a fashion magazine into a digital shopping experience. Using the new Visual Shazam feature, Stylight ran a print ad in the front pages of the magazine, letting readers know that they could use their smartphone cameras and the Shazam app to scan any item in the magazine and buy them directly through Stylight.
The solution
Stylight booked an ad in the magazine just before the print deadline. On the magazine's publication day, the marketing team scanned every page with fashion items that could be purchased, created matching product pages with Stylight URLs for every item, and linked the scans with the Stylight URLs in the Shazam database. Within one hour, the campaign was up and running, and every fashion item in the magazine could be scanned with the Shazam app and then purchased via the Stylight website. A short demo clip was created and sent out, and lifestyle media picked up the story.
The key to this campaign was Visual Shazam, a new feature on the Shazam app. Image recognition technology like Visual Shazam may not be completely new, but Shazam has made the technology faster, more reliable, and more seamless than anyone else. And, unlike niche apps, Shazam was already installed on the smartphones of 90 percent of Stylight's target audience. This meant that there was no extra download needed. All people had to do was start Shazam, snap the item, and get it instantly through Stylight. Simple.
The results
The campaign resulted in more than 20,000 scans, with an average conversion rate of 38 percent. Popular fashion influencers talked about the stunt on social media, and 186 of the products from the magazine sold out on Stylight during the promotion. Best of all, the magazine received hundreds of letters and emails from readers who were thrilled by the new service, and from now on, it will be integrating the Stylight/Shazam digital shopping experience into every issue.
