The opening of your shop is a unique moment in a brand’s life. Whether it’s your first point of sale, or a shop in a new town/country. It’s not only a huge investment, but also a lot of work.

In a context where consumers are purchasing online, brands need to redouble creativity to attract them to the shop. This is true in the case of a shop opening.

Preparing to open a store is not to be taken lightly. On the contrary, it’s an event that you need to prepare and plan carefully to attract traffic to your shops.

In this article, we share with you some advice and strategies for opening a shop. We’ll be looking at gamification. This is the incorporation of playable elements into communication materials to boost the appeal for the audience!

SUMMARY

• The challenges of a store opening
• How can you gamify a store opening?

The inauguration of a new shop represents an investment for a brand. While retail allows you to create a special bond with customers, it also means a significant budget (whether for the purchase of the doorstep, rent, furnishings, staff).

A first challenge when opening a store is to boost its visibility with the brand’s customers, but also of its target audience. This in a territory that is sometimes different from online clientele. The first objective is to ensure that the shop is well known to its target audience and to attract as many customers as possible.

But the inauguration of a store also presents specific challenges. It’s an opportunity for the company to boost its image by organising a unique event. During which prospects and customers can interact personally with the teams. The opening must also engage the target audience. Moreover, it build loyalty so that they want to make a purchase, but also to come back.

The company can take advantage of this opportunity to gather feedback and thus get to know their audience (with whom they have sometimes interacted online). By offering tools for collecting opinions and preferences, the company can then reactivate its customers by offering them content and offers that are likely to engage them!

Traditionally, gamification is an effective lever for boosting a brand’s drive to store strategy. By incorporating playable elements into their campaigns, companies can capture the attention of their audience, encouraging them to visit their shops and encourage them to make purchases.

Gamification is an interesting tool to mobilise as part of a shop opening. The interactivity and promise of attractive rewards are two powerful assets to encourage consumers to come to the inauguration (potentially with other potential customers) and to create a strong connection with the brand.

Here are 3 ways to gamify your shop opening

1. Create media hype around your online store opening

Digital marketing is a tool for extending the reach of your message and attracting a wider audience. Particularly if it is used creatively and strategically, notably through gamification. On social networks, brands can capture the interest of their audience and create a buzz around their store opening by organising an online competition. An instant win, such as a Wheel of Fortune, can be used to give away discount vouchers to be used on the day of the opening.

It’s also easier to make the most of consumer expectations with gamification. This is known as teasing, or the art of gradually revealing clues in order to capture and the attention of your audience. The brand can imagine a digital treasure hunt through which its community can guess the location of its future shop.

Gamification also enhances the effectiveness of other web marketing strategies. To create a media hype around your event. This is the case with influencer marketing. The brand teams up with a content creator to communicate about the opening and encourage consumers to attend (to meet the influencer in the flesh). It can gamify its campaign by offering rewards (such as an in-store personal shopping session, vouchers, backstage access with the designer).

2. Gamify your store opening to better engage and convert consumers

Once on site, gamification can enable the company to liven up the opening of its shop and effectively engage visitors. To make the event more interactive, it can install digital terminals where customers take part in marketing games. These activities make the inauguration dynamic and bring customers back into the shop, increasing the amount of time spent with the brand.

It’s also an effective way of converting more customers. Marketing games are a way of distributing coupons that encourage purchases by offering participants attractive discounts.

Interactive games can also be used to highlight products by presenting them (and their advantages) in an original and fun way. In this way, the brand can offer Quizzes to make it easier to discover its catalog and communicate its value proposition.

3. Collecting and exploiting customer feedback to boost loyalty

Finally, marketing games offered at shop openings are an effective way of collecting customer feedback and data. Before being able to access a marketing game (on an interactive terminal or after scanning a QR code on a label via Scan&Play), the customer will have to fill in a form. It enables the brand to find out about the customer’s demographic profile (and better identify its audience), but also to ask about their product preferences.

Customer data will enable them to create drive-to-store and conversion campaigns (online and physical) that are personalised and therefore effective. This is an essential step in building customer loyalty and ensuring stable, long-term revenues for your shop.

Conclusion

Gamification is a powerful lever for boosting traffic at shop openings. It can also be used to generate more sales and build loyalty among retail customers. To make your inauguration more interactive and engaging, discover our marketing games that are easy to deploy in-store.

A marketing calendar is essential for planning marketing events in line with your strategy. Depending on the sector of activity, the specific characteristics of the audience and the objectives that brands set themselves, they can position themselves at different key times throughout the year. In this article, we explore the importance of creating and optimising your 2025 marketing calendar.

What evergreen contents shouldn’t be missed, the strategic marketing objectives they can help you achieve and the different formats you can use to engage your audience? Here’s our complete guide!

SUMMARY

• What is a marketing calendar and why create one for your brand?
• Different marketing themes to activate different strategic objectives
• 4 interactive ideas for the 2025 calendar

To be effective, rationalise their efforts and avoid missing an important date, brands need to plan their promotions around the main marketing events of the coming year.

The marketing calendar enables brands to engage their prospects and customers throughout the year. It includes all the key dates: Sales, Black Friday, Mother’s and Father’s Day, Christmas, Valentine’s Day. Brands know exactly when to broadcast their campaigns. The aim is to capitalise on purchase intentions, for example, or simply to animate their community and stay top of mind.

Beyond the commercial evergreen contents, planning the 2025 marketing calendar should be an opportunity for brands to choose the right highlights for their vertical and their audience. The idea is not to position yourself on every holiday and event of the year. But rather to identify those that resonate with prospects and customers and that are aligned with the company’s overall objectives.

End-of-year festivities, sales of seasonal events can be ideal occasions to launch interactive campaigns focusing on discounts or exclusive offers to generate more sales! But special occasions such as sporting events and international days (for pizza, pets, etc.) can also enable brands to raise their profile or raise awareness of their commitments (via interactive quizzes, for example).

More generally, events planned throughout the marketing calendar can be aimed at stimulating and engaging the community. Commercial highlights are an opportunity to multiply the points of contact with your audience. It’s also a good time to strengthen ties and achieve love brand status.

In this way, brands can move away from a purely transactional relationship with their community. The idea is to encourage exchanges through interactive activities. Competitions to showcase their creativity, sports games to capitalise on the excitement of a sporting event. With this new technology and by adopting different playable marketing formats, companies can entertain and activate their audience throughout the year. They can also adopt target different objectives and adapt to different types of event (commercial, sporting, cultural, institutional, etc.)

As we have just seen the whole point of creating a marketing calendar is to be able to identify the relevant commercial highlights for its brand. But also to vary the entertainment offered to your audience!

Engaging customers, recruiting new prospects, collecting data to personalise future campaigns or generating sales… here are 4 playable marketing formats for 4 marketing events in 2025.

1. A Gift Finder for Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day is the ideal opportunity for brands to capitalise on the purchasing intentions of consumers looking for a gift for their loved one. It’s also the perfect time to offer a Gift finder to its audience. This gamified animation enables participants to answer a series of questions and then access a personalised recommendation of products or services to offer their partner.

Why this Playable marketing idea works: The Gift finder not only boosts Valentine’s Day sales by intelligently redirecting prospects to products or services that are likely to interest them. But its also an excellent format for collecting data (particularly product preferences) on your audience so that you can activate them more effectively in future campaigns.

2. An anecdote competition for Mother’s Day

Why this Palayable marketing idea works: competitions allow you to engage your community through creative challenges that are easy to complete. It’s also an excellent way for brands to generate UGC and therefore diversify their content strategy more easily.

3. An Outrun for the Tour de France

4. A 100% winning One-Armed bandit for Black Friday

Every year, Black Friday is an opportunity for consumers to make savings on their Christmas shopping and treat themselves at a lower cost. For this highlight of the 2025 marketing calendar, brands can offer games like a 100% winning One-armed Bandit to distribute discounts to their audience and generate more sales.

Why this Playable marketing idea works: 100% instant wins make it easier for brands to attract the attention of their prospects, who are particularly solicited during this busy sales period. It’s also a format that’s easy to adapt to your sales-boosting objectives. You can add a deadline or conditions of use (on the online shop, in physical shops, etc.)

Conclusion

Creating your 2025 marketing calendar is the best way to effectively plan your sales events for the whole year and control your resources (time and money). Download our free comprehensive guide to fine-tune your strategy and optimise your competitions!

On average, going in store to try and pay for their purchase is still preferred by 65% of French people.
However, this preference is declining among young people, forcing brands to revitalise their physical points of sale in addition to their online channels, in particular by organising an in store animation.

Whether to boost brand awareness, increase store and website traffic sales promotion is an essential marketing lever. In fact, it permits to generate more sales and build loyalty through a unique shopping experience. It has an even greater impact when it immerses customers in the brand’s universe, notably with in-store competitions offered via QR codes or interactive terminals.

In this article, we’ll take a look at Galeries Lafayette’s animated marketing strategy, through several examples of campaigns.

SUMMARY

• What is an in-store marketing event?
• Gamifying in-store sales events: the Galeries Lafayette example

An in-store brand promotion is a commercial operation designed to boost the appeal and profitability of physical points of sale. Its one-off or regular actions can, for example, serve to promote the brand’s image. In fact, it provides greater visibility for a new product launch, it also boosts sales and builds loyalty.

Depending on the expected results, marketing activities can take a variety of forms: product demonstrations, competitions, distribution of discount coupons, treasure hunts in the aisles, and so on.

In all cases, the ultimate goal is to capture the public’s attention, be it the store’s visitors or the brand’s audience. Online, we speak of a drive-to-store strategy. The aim is always the same: to increase in-store traffic.

For several years now, the company has relied on marketing gamification (the integration of interactive and playful elements into its marketing activities) to energize its points of sale and online campaigns.

1. Boost store awareness with brand animation

The primary benefit of in-store marketing events is to raise brand awareness. In-store marketing events give the brand greater visibility, help it stand out from the competition and attract consumers to the store.

This includes the creation of POS (point-of-sale) advertising. The brand will therefore develop advertising media installed directly in its shop (in the window, in front of the shop entrance, on the shelves) to promote the point of sale itself, a brand event or a product.

To arouse the curiosity of consumers, Les Galeries created Tesla stands in their stores, giving the partner brand a high profile via an interactive quiz organized during the Weekend de l’homme. By exhibiting cars and offering great prizes (a weekend in a luxury hotel with the loan of a Tesla), the brand was able to attract a large number of participants to the in-store operation.

2. Engaging in-store audiences with interactive kiosks

In-store marketing operations can also be designed to liven up the point-of-sale and engage customers and encourage them to make a purchase (or increase their average shopping basket). Marketing contests, offered via interactive terminals displayed in store allows you to :

• generate more interaction with customers,
• maintain their interest through fun activities,
• strengthen the relationship with the brand, in particular through the possibility of winning an attractive prize.

For Mother’s Day, Galeries Lafayette offered its customers a 100% winning one-armed bandit. Accessible via interactive terminals installed for 3 days in 6 stores in France, the aim of this marketing campaign was to energize sales outlets during this commercial highlight.

The marketing game was also available in mobile format in all stores of France via a QR code displayed on site. This omnichannel strategy enabled the brand to increase the engagement and reach of its campaign. It was able to animate all its stores with particularly attractive prizes (Relais Châteaux stays, bouquets of flowers, gift cards, promotional codes, etc.).

These rewards also enabled the brand to target a second conversion objective. By offering generous value gift cards, this brand strategy boosted sales and collected qualified leads, which could then be reactivated with offers at the end of the game.

3. Build customer loyalty and increase in-store re-purchase rates

Last but not least, in-store marketing events can help to reinforce a sense of belonging to a brand community and build customer loyalty.

Galeries Lafayette has once again relied on gamified animations to reenchant its in-store loyalty program. By organizing a Wheel of Fortune, the company was able to increase the visibility of the Galeries Lafayette Mastercard, through a post-purchase activation.

The Mastercard campaign was based on the Gate Code principle, whereby participants had to enter a code received after an in-store purchase (by email) to access a game of instant wins, and thus gain a chance to win gift vouchers. The campaign met its retention targets with over 2 codes entered per participant (and as many in-store purchases made with the card).

Conclusion

Organizing in-store marketing events is an innovative and creative way to captivate and engage customers. Inspired by the Galeries Lafayette use case, you can boost traffic and sales in your stores. Discover our catalog of gamified sales animations and customize them to suit your objectives and brand universe.

Christmas is a magical time when we want to please our loved ones and ourselves. Consumers are more inclined to interact with brand content, especially when it inspires them to buy gifts.

For companies, Christmas represents an average of 20% of sales. It is therefore crucial to create distinctive Christmas marketing campaigns to capture audience’s attention and boost their sales.

In this article, we’ll be sharing ideas for interactive formats and games to help you achieve your objectives and energize your Christmas marketing campaign.

SUMMARY

• Anticipate the festive season to optimise your campaigns
• 5 trends to boost your Christmas marketing campaign
• 3 ideas for Christmas marketing campaigns to stand out from the crowd

E-commerce is booming. At Christmas time 75% of French people buy their gifts on the Internet.

They are inclined to spend online and to plan their purchases so as to spread them over several months. They also want to take advantage of the promotional periods that precede this time (such as Black Friday).

For brands, this means anticipating marketing campaigns as far as possible. They can multiply the points of contact with their audiences, and the opportunites to make purchases on the website (or in-store).

The highlights leading up to Christmas (Halloween, Black Friday, etc.) are opportunities for collecting leads. Companies will be able to activate them by creating marketing campaigns that are effective in converting prospects.

Speaking out in advance allows you to position before everyone else. Brands can boost their visibility and reduce their media budget by communicating when competition is less intense and consumers are less affected by ‘advertising fatigue’.

To create a Christmas campaign, it’s important to take account of your audience’s expectations, and market trends. Whether linked to advertising, marketing or new habits, these trends will enable companies to engage consumers during the festive season.

These include :

• Made in France. 1 consumer in 2 would prefer local products, Made In France, for Christmas presents. Brands can capitalise on this trend to offer competition prizes that are in line with their customers’ values;
• The end of third-party cookies and proprietary data collection. Brands need to focus on implementing zero-party data collection and opt-in tools to maintain contact and refine their customer knowledge.
• Influence marketing remains a powerful lever for engagement. Consumers are sensitive to partnerships between brands and content creators. These campaigns are effective to generate new conversions.
• Short content is recommended to effectively captivate your audience. Companies need to take account of consumers’ attention spans and offer animations that will encourage users to stop scrolling.
• Native advertising (i.e. that respects the format and codes of the channel on which it is broadcast) is crucial to optimise your presence. It makes for a smoother, more immersive experience.

By capitalising on these trends to capture consumers’ attention, brands can create Christmas marketing campaigns, targeting their objectives.

To inspire them, here are 3 ideas for animations and interactive campaigns to engage and convert your audience.

An engaging speed game to boost brand awareness

Gamification (i.e. incorporating playful elements into sales promotions) is a way for brands to capture and hold consumers attention. One of the most effective formats is an engaging mechanic like Tiny Wings.

This speed game was used by household appliance brand Electrolux for its ‘A Swedish Christmas’ campaign. The aim was to highlight the company’s Swedish origins through a fun, viral game, and thus raise its profile over the festive period.

The addictive nature of the marketing game enabled to capitalise on the interaction to collect opt-ins. With an engagement rate of 92% and sessions lasting 1 minute and 18 seconds. This activity helped to strengthen the brand’s appeal to consumers over the period.

SFR Réunion also relied on this mechanism for its Christmas campaign. Focused on lead generation, this was a great success during the recruitment, thanks to a media strategy based on native advertising.

Thanks to an attractive prize fund, the company was able to attract more than 10k new visitors. And with more than 7 games played per subscriber and a playing time of over 3 minutes, this activity generated support for the brand.

2. Instant win for Christmas coupons

Instant winners are also effective during the Christmas period, when users are looking for deals and discounts to save on their purchases.

The 100% winning Claw machine, enables companies to distribute coupons to participants. Showroomprivé.com banked on this Christmas game during the festive season. 7,000 vouchers were distributed, helping to convert prospects and boosting the brand’s sales.

This animation is part of a drive to store campaign during the Christmas period. McDonald’s franchisees in the North of France have chosen to set up a campaign combining a Flappy and a 100% winning claw machine. These events enabled users to win discount vouchers to be used to purchase a Maxi Best Of menu in participating restaurants. This was a way of boosting traffic in the brand’s points of sale.

3. An omnichannel Christmas campaign to engage consumers

It takes an average of 8 interactions between a brand and its prospect before they are ready to buy. If brands want to to boost their Christmas sales, they need to multiply the incentives to buy with their audience.

This is what brands can do by implementing an omnichannel Christmas campaign. Companies will deploy a marketing game (such as the Shopping List ) across their communication channels. Adictiz’s customisable form can be used in interactive formats across 4 distinct channels: the e-commerce site, blog articles, live shopping sessions and native advertising.

Brands will be able to engage their audience across their channels, multiplying interactions to convert prospects and boost their Christmas sales.

Conclusion

To create a Christmas marketing campaign, your brand can rely on engaging game mechanics that will capture consumers’ attention. Create differentiating experiences to boost your brand awareness, collect leads and generate conversions during the festive season thanks to our interactive marketing activities!