Payless Opened a Fake Luxury Store, ‘Palessi,’ to See How Much People Would Pay for $20 Shoes

Payless opened a fake pop up luxury store “Palessi” and invited social media influencers to trick them into buying their $20-$40 shoes for over ten times the price. The plan worked! The influencers believed they were buying luxury shoes and even were willing to be interviewed about their purchase. Many commented on the material and style of the shoe and how it was worth the money. Imagine their surprise when they found out their shoes can be bought at Payless. This Payless PR stunt immediately found success.

Brand perception is important, Payless is known for their low prices, but low prices can also make a consumer perceive items as cheap and low in quality as well. What Payless did was to prove that despite a low price their items are high quality and modern. Additionally, it played on the power of branding utilizing everything from the fancy venue, name, pricing and invitees to create an illusion of a high-quality brand. Within the QSR space, lower prices don’t necessarily mean low quality items, this is where branding becomes an important factor. This is not limited to Marketing, but it can extend to venue, employees and service. As the QSR becomes crowded, branding becomes key to differentiate from the others.

Target Uses AR To Sell Christmas Trees

Target is using AR in their app for users to visualize their Christmas tree shopping. “See It In Your Space” is part of the Target app that allows customers to virtually place a tree and other décor items in their home.

It seems Target is taking advantage of the market space that’s opened after Toys R Us and Sears stores closures, and furthermore trying to compete directly with Amazon. Features such as expedited shipping and utilization of technology in the user experience have proven efficiency for Target as Christmas trees have been selling at twice the normal rate.

Target’s introduction of AR is not new, but it’s likely taking learnings from companies such as IKEA, who have seen success with the same tech capabilities that utilize AR to imagine your room with IKEA furniture through its app – which saw over 2 million app downloads and 2.3 billion visitors to the website, showcasing it has a positive effect on overall business, not just app downloads.

Target is another brand that’s found a perfect way to educate and bring AR technology to consumers in a way that’s both of benefit to the consumer, fun and easily digestible way. As AR continues to grow, we need to future think how we can utilize this technology within our app to benefit the consumer.

Instagram Just Killed “Finstas” By Adding A Close-Friends-Only Feature

As part of its round of updates, Instagram is rolling out a “Close Friends” feature, where users can customize a list of Close Friends and only allow the select group of friends to see Stories and Highlights. Instagram has “borrowed” plenty of features from Snapchat, and this is another key trait that the company are looking to replicate. And in doing so it has managed, in a relatively short period of time, to build what feels like its own successful social silo.

Fake Instagram accounts, known as “Finsta”, allow anonymity for users to use them much like that of Snapchat account. Instagram after all is an open platform and easy to sign up with minimal verification needed. Instead of taking this as a privacy issue and requiring more validation in the sign-up process or having Finstas identify themselves, Instagram is allowing users themselves to filter them out.

They’re also recognizing a new pool of audience: the “in-between” users who don’t necessarily want to put their account on Private but also don’t want to expose their lives to strangers.

We’ve seen messaging apps and communication platforms handle personalizing and privacy concerns well, and we’ve also seen those that… don’t do as well. It’s important that huge platforms like Instagram ensure privacy for a safe user experience. If Instagram is taking a stand to make a closed circle network, one that’s a more personal experience within friendship groups, it may also limit or drive growth between brands and the audience at hand.

Burger King Trolls McDonald’s With 1 Cent Burger Promotion

Burger King is trolling McDonalds by offering a $0.01 Whopper if a user opens their app to unlock a deal when within a range of McDonald’s restaurants. Once someone is within 600 feet of a McDonald’s location, the 1 cent offer is unlocked. If the person asks to redeem the Whopper offer at the McDonald’s, many McDonald’s employees have turned back the person telling them the offer is invalid, and the Burger King app redirects them to the nearest Burger King location to truly redeem the offer.

The age-old “Burger Wars” between these Burger King and McDonalds continues. With “Where’s the beef” becoming a huge catchphrase in the ‘80’s throwing shade at McDonald’s fluffy burgers with nowhere to be found beef, Burger King looks to establish its position as the all-time top rival of McDonald’s.

Burger King is doing a couple things well: 1. Using Technology to directly call out and conquest against the leader in the QSR+Tech space. 2. Promoting and getting more downloads for the BK app. 3. Keeping up the witty brand tone and voice by trolling, and being culturally relevant – and it paid off with Burger King getting a ton of earned media and PR, on top of their owned channels.

Select Safeway Stores Offer First AI-Powered Medical Clinics

Two select Safeway phoenix stores have partnered with Akos Med Clinc to offer AI powered medical clinics in the Safeway stores. The AI clinics will have patients sit in front of a computer screen that will have an AR guide them with FDA approved simple to use medical devices to collect their own data, such as weight, temperature, blood pressure and blood oxygen content, as well as ear, nose and throat images to chest, lung and abdomen sounds. The entire process is estimated to take 15 minutes. The kiosks will function as a regular ‘in-doctor’ visit with a diagnosis, prescription, and follow ups to check on a patient’s progress.

As technology advances, AI is starting to become accepted and less feared by consumers. The partnership with Safeway and a clinic showcases how AI is even allowed to be part of a person’s sensitive medical information, an indication of where many industries are leading to. With AI becoming more prominent it would not be too farfetched to believe AI can potentially replace all POP focused industries within the near future.

McDonald’s Honors ‘Hamburger Menu’ Creator With Reddit Takeover

McDonalds has honored the creator of the “Hamburger menu” or collapse menu icon, Norm Cox, by taking over Reddit and transforming the site’s hamburger menu to an actual cheeseburger. McDonalds will also offer a discount through the app when customers tap on the hamburger menu, either on Reddit or on their site. McDonalds already has a well-established relationship with the Reddit community with over 13,000 subscribers to their subreddit, therefore the takeover for the anniversary of an icon seemed like a genuine play by the brand.

We already saw strong success as one of the first QSR brands to utilize the Reddit platform for our AMA campaign, where we had our authentic Jack brand tone and voice that encouraged users to engage. McDonalds has clearly found learnings here as the takeover was well designed to promote their items without interrupting a user’s experience, and their AMA with Norm Cox allowed McDonalds to appear genuine, especially in a platform such as Reddit where it is heavily based on community.

Pizza Hut Makes One of Its Biggest Acquisitions Ever

Pizza Hut has acquired QuikOrder, a provider of YUM! Brands’ digital ordering system of 20+ years for an undisclosed amount. The global pizza chain will now have full access to consumer data that will allow Pizza Hut to increase growth by accommodating and refining their online delivery service based off of consumer behavior and habits. Part of the new online functions will include improving current delivery tracker with text alerts and voice-enabled digital assistants.

The technology war between pizza chains continues, especially after Dominoes’ identified itself as a ‘Technology’ company. Still, this new acquisition gives Pizza Hut an advantage as it will be able to utilize first party data to aide and inform their business needs and boost sales.

The QSR/technology merge had been tremendous this year – it’s assumed that we can order via DoorDash, GrubHub, or Postmates, or even have their own people delivering to homes. While most players are answering the “Who can do it better?” question, there remains the after question “What are we learning?”. Having access to first party data allows this question to be answered and takes in truly the impact online delivery has had to the QSR industry.

“Cheat Day” App Helps Find Healthiest Items from Fast Food Restaurants

iOS app, “Cheat Day” lists every item on the menu for 750 different restaurants, sortable by nutrition, protein, calories, carbs, fat and full nutritional breakdown. The menu items are ranked by their healthiness factor, and you can also build a virtual meal within the app and see what the nutritional breakdown or your entire order looks like – helping users have an overall one-stop view of the food.

As more people balance health consciousness with cheat meals, educational apps as such provide alternative solutions for those who want more of a balanced meal, and help drive opportunity for those that may originally discount the restaurant due to perception of health-conscious offers available.

Given we have a wider variety of products, can we play into the few options from a health consciousness aspect against competitors?

KFC adds Waffles to the Menu for Fried Chicken and Waffles

Starting Nov. 12 until end of the year, KFC is introducing Fried Chicken & Waffles across the US. The build is simple: KFC’s famous friend chicken on top of a Belgian style waffle with syrup. It’s also available as a sandwich starting at $5.99.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen the boom of local, hole-in-the-wall restaurants like ‘Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles’ and more restaurants offering the item. These restaurants attract both the high loyalty customers and Millennial “Foodies” who keep up with the latest trends, and have become a sort of social commodity. KFC adding waffles showcases they’re aiming to attract a new audience base, and move into the QSR+ competitive category.

While the Chicken & Waffles combination is nothing new, KFC’s addition has people asking, “Why didn’t we think of this before?” KFC, a specialist in fried chicken, is riding the wave of the love for Chicken and Waffles.

Mobile Orders Dominate Thanksgiving Shopping

Revenue generated on Thanksgiving increased by 18% YoY thanks to window shopping from the couch. For the first time Mobile reportedly dominated online Thanksgiving Day purchases, with 54% of online orders. As one of the top shopping days of the US holiday season, we saw the peak in mobile orders following the trend. Traffic was highest after 4 PM, and peaking 8-10 PM, meaning shoppers enjoyed shopping and while browsing post-Thanksgiving dinner.

Earlier this year Nike had partnered with Snapchat for their new releases and orders, highlighting the demand and attention are clearly there for consumers in the mobile and social space. Brands continue to create seamless experiences online for consumers; Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday (more like Cyber Week) were the perfect opportunity to see this come to life in a full scale, but this year we also saw a tease phase heavily utilized to tease anticipation surrounding the deals with SMS and push notifications up 159% YOY.

So regardless of the day itself, you can see that brands have utilized a phasing strategy that has continued for well over a week in most instances.