Boosting consumer engagement for your brand with Laava Smart Fingerprints®
Customer loyalty: the holy grail
Repeat customers who champion your brand are the holy grail of sales success. Yet it’s no secret that this is driven by consumer engagement: creating meaningful connections with your customers is a key factor in building brand loyalty. By engaging with consumers, brands build trust and establish an emotional connection that drives repeat business.
This relationship is formed in many different ways: customer service, market positioning, online and media presence are all important elements, but your packaging itself also has an important role to play.
“Laava’s customers enjoy creating exciting, compelling consumer experiences. And consumers who access those opportunities engage with the brand deeply and memorably – at point of purchase and beyond.”
Gavin Ger, CEO and Co-Founder, Laava
Secure connected packaging: the frontline between your brand and your consumer
Secure connected packaging refers to the integration of technology with traditional packaging materials to enhance the customer experience and provide valuable data to the brand owner. This can include interactive elements such as QR codes or NFC tags, augmented reality features, or digital technologies to track and analyse consumer behaviour.
Consumers in 2023 are well accustomed to using their mobile devices as part of their shopping experience. Already, about 8% of retail transactions take place through a mobile device, and that figure is tipped to exceed 10% by 2025 (source: Insider Intelligence).
Increasingly, retailers are adopting innovative technologies to overcome the gap between the physical and the digital experience, to boost customer satisfaction and engagement. A a recent piece by Forbes explores how businesses embrace the growing demand for “phygital” (physical/digital) experiences. According to a recent survey by Prosper Insights & Analytics, 25% of adults in the US already use their smartphones to redeem or scan coupons while at an in-store checkout.
Our unique, patented technology, the Laava Smart Fingerprint, is a form of secure connected packaging that is quickly becoming The Global Mark of Trust™.
Read how Laava customer Reid Fruits ran an outstanding customer engagement strategy for its premium Tasmanian cherries, at the same time drastically reducing the number of recorded counterfeit attempts on its brand.
Wait, can’t a QR code do that?
While QR codes and NFC tags are popular forms of connected packaging, they have one major drawback: they are not secure.
QR codes can be easily created by anyone easily and in just minutes. This matters to brand owners – when counterfeiters can create look-alike products with look-alike QR codes just as easily as they can. Because of this weakness, there’s no way to ensure accurate or trustworthy information for consumers, and no way for consumers to safely authenticate products using QR codes. This can lead to consumers being misled or directed to malicious websites, which can damage the brand’s reputation and erode consumer trust.
By contrast, Laava’s connected packaging suite is secure by design, as well as being engaging for consumers. Consumers can be sure that the Laava Smart Fingerprint on their product was created by the brand owner – providing the confidence to engage deeper with the immersive brand content enabled by the Laava platform.
They’ll also be confident that any data or interactions they have while entering a competition, joining the mailing list or redeeming an NFT – will all be handled securely.
Read more about how Laava Smart Fingerprints are the upgrade from the QR code.
Driving consumer engagement with competitions and rewards
Competitions and rewards are a great way to get consumers involved and interacting with your brand. Loyalty programs and exclusive offers can create a sense of excitement and anticipation, which can help to drive engagement and build a loyal customer base. Competitions can also assist in increasing brand awareness by encouraging customers to share their experiences with others.
An excellent example is Laava’s work with Swift + Moore to showcase their newly released ‘Walking With Giants’ wine, in an exclusive collaboration with Aldi Supermarkets in Australia. With bottles of wine ranged in Aldi supermarkets across the country, shoppers were able to scan and enter a competition to win a case of Walking With Giants wine, as well as immerse themselves in the stories behind the wine. Read more in a LinkedIn article by Laava’s CEO and Co-Founder Gavin Ger.
Gaining valuable data through competitions and rewards
Ideally, consumer engagement is a two-way street. Your business learns about its customers, and customers also gain from the experience. By using Laava Smart Fingerprints to create competitions and reward programs, businesses can gain valuable insights into their customers’ buying habits and preferences – as well as collecting all-important feedback.
With Laava’s sophisticated management platform, brand owners have access to real-time data and a full suite of analytics that provide valuable insights into customer behaviour, including:
- where and when your products are scanned
- Insights into scans by SKU, colour, style, and a variety of other factors;
- demographic indicators such as the phone make, model and operating system used to scan the Fingerprints;
- the social platform used to scan (e.g. WeChat, Facebook);
- overall dwell time, as well as time spent on specific content blocks;
- which calls to action and packaging designs are most effective in triggering scanning activity;
- which types of rewards or promotions resonate with consumers.
This information can then be used to make informed decisions about future promotions and marketing efforts.
One of the most crucial data points that Laava Smart Fingerprints collects is the location of scans – a crucial indicator of market / geographic uptake, and also an incredible asset for brand managers to track where there products actually end up (versus where they were expected to!) .
For brands that are the targets of counterfeit, copycats and grey market activity, that data is a game-changer. Once anomalies are identified, the rich analytic data provided by the Laava platform can be further investigated using a variety of methods – even being used by forensic investigators .
The take-away? The higher the number of people who scan the Fingerprint on your product, the easier it is to expose counterfeit and grey market activity, building consumer engagement and brand value at the same time. Tempting competitions and irresistible rewards will shoot that scan rate sky high.
Success stories: consumer engagement for the win
Brands like Tamburlaine Organic Wines trust Laava to deliver integrated consumer engagement strategies that include competitions and rewards. Read their case study here.
One of our favourites is the Hayes Family Wines giveaway, in which customers scanned a Laava Smart Fingerprint for a chance to win a VIP trip for two to the Barossa Valley, and to access a range of unique experiences, such as making wines with the winemaker.
Uniagro used Laava Smart Fingerprints to help celebrate its 30th anniversary, with a Laava-enabled competition for its customers in Brazil. The scan-to-win offer also unlocked product verification, proof of the brand’s sustainability and nutrition credentials, and engaging digital storytelling to learn more about Uniagro.
To learn more, see our blog post Driving conversion and revenue with connected packaging: 3 ways to win over consumers.
To conclude – you already know that implementing a strategy for consumer engagement is critical to the success of your brand. Connected packaging takes that to the next level – turning ordinary packaging into a powerful tool to assure, engage and reward consumers. And all of this can be delivered quickly, easily and cost effectively – with Laava’s expert team at your side, not to mention Laava’s powerful self-serve tools.
With the ability to gather data and insights you can use to optimise your marketing, product design, and customer loyalty, Laava Smart Fingerprints are a valuable investment for any brand looking to connect with their customers in unique and memorable ways.
Learn more about Laava
To take your first step towards harnessing the power of secure connected packaging to drive consumer engagement, contact Laava today.
