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!