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Brave Enough for -22°F? The North Face Took Their Pop-Up Store to the EXTREME!

Innosek 3D

From Episode 1 of our Brand IRL Podcast: The North Face knows their audience craves exploration. Did their remote, freezing pop-up store hit the mark? Host John Kappel (https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-kappel327) breaks down this campaign's strengths and weaknesses and gives it a score on the EPIC Experiential Score. If you're an adventurer, this episode of Experience Effect is for YOU!


The North Face's coldest pop up gets a 6.3 out of ten on the epic experiential score.


The North Face's coldest pop-up campaign opened for one week during the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, China creating an experiential campaign that excited and connected with their very specific audience the ones that live and breathe exploration and adventure.


In 2022, with the combination of the North Face not being an official sponsor of the Winter Olympic Games, and with the events for the games being held at the Ganting Snow Park, where North Face had one of their largest and most iconic stores located, was forced to shut down the store for the entirety of the Olympic Games as they were in a sponsor. So what does a brave and creative marketing-focused company do when they face adversity like this? Well, they rebel and they move their store to a snowy, remote mountain range in the middle of southeast China and cleverly name the campaign "The Coldest Pop-Up Store". So the Olympic attendees, backcountry skiers, and explorers who are visiting Genting Mountain and want to go to the North Face store find that the doors are closed and attached there's a map with instructions inviting guests on an adventure for them to discover the coolest pop-up store, where only the most extreme explorers would take on this challenge and go on this carefully curated adventure. Exactly the type of person The North Face sells to. So after miles of walking through the snowy and freezing forest with only another handful of people (if any) along with you, they reach a clearing. In the distance lies the mute green-painted pop up store decorated with a huge backlit LED North Face logo. A creative experience that the target audience will remember forever and create an instance of pure excitement.

North Face's Coldest Pop-Up Breakdown

The North Face's coldest pop-up experiential campaign was a one week long campaign created by creative agency Fred and Farid Shanghai and generated 13.2 million impressions across their social media channels with most of those impressions coming from the one-minute-long teaser video that was put together by the agency. The campaign is part of a larger set of experiential marketing campaigns by The North Face, which they call Never Stop Exploring.


Coldest Pop Up Analysis

From a brand IRL perspective, we like to analyze campaign success by answering a few questions.

  1. Did it align with the brand message or mission? The North Face's first sentence of their mission statement is "exploration is our oxygen" and this campaign breathes that. By sending their target audience on an adventure to discover their store and encouraging consumers to live their mission of exploration, they hit this.

  2. Did the experiential marketing campaign strengthen the emotional connection with their target market? Two instances in this campaign strengthen emotional connections between the brand and the audience. The first is when customers arrive at Genting Mountain store to find the doors are locked and learn about the opportunity for a side quest adventure. Instantly, shoppers minds start to race and their heart rate increases as they contemplate this adventure. The second is once you break through the trees to the clearing, see the large LED North Face logo on the shop, and know that you've made it. The North Face knows its target audience lives for the moment of "We Made It" and created the experience around this moment.

  3. Did the campaign create a memorable, shareable moment? Outside of some of the user-generated content made by the explorers and posted to their personal social media channels, and outside of that well-produced teaser video made by the agency, I wouldn't say that this experiential marketing campaign created many shareable moments. We like to gauge shareable moments by ones that make people say WOW, OMG, LOL, or SMH. Those are the in-the-moment feelings that make people want to share what they are experiencing.

  4. Was the campaign engaging and interactive? With the adventure aside, the experience wasn't very engaging and interactive. As explorers arrive at the small pop-up shop they can view some cool North Face branded hiking gear that decorates the walls and try on the latest Winter Clothing Drop, and drop off with that into a sub par shopping experience as there isn't much room to fit more than a few people and only a limited number of items for purchase. The pop up itself lacked interactivity in the form of things people can touch, play with, take pictures with and they missed an opportunity to continue that excitement post adventure.

Pros of Coldest Pop Up Campaign

The North Face did a great job of gearing their entire campaign to their target market of explorers. The shopper who's down for an adventure to find the coldest pop-up shop is the target audience for The North Face, and they did a really great job of putting themselves in their shoes and perspective of their audience, creating an experience of exploration through extreme conditions, which their audience would resonate and get excited about. Another big win here for them was the relevancy. Timing is everything, and it was a big winner because of the Olympic buzz that they got to draw off of. Everybody knows that relevance is key in virality, and this is an experience not offered anywhere else but during the 2022 Olympic Games.

The North Face was able to create a superhero story. Getting their store shut down and quickly and creatively picking it up and moving it to a location that dares adventure and created a buzz and memorable moment that was bigger than if the store was open to begin with.


Cons of Coldest Pop Up Campaign

The campaign definitely had some lackluster moments and fell short of its potential. By making the experience so exclusive the majority of North Face users didn't even know about the experience until weeks, months, or years after it occurred. The experience gives the feel that it was created for the video vs the actual experience as the concept is excellent, but lacked the execution to make it a 10/10 campaign. The actual pop-up store itself was a bit of a miss. An increase in the integration of graphics, sensory engagement, or setting up activities would have been easy ways to interact and engage the audience while they are in the shop, enhancing the experience and the emotional connection with the brand and new products. The North Face also missed out on the opportunity to get feedback from some of their future products or innovations which would give them the sense of importance and bring them into a VIP experience.


The EPIC Experiential Rating

With that, we're going to give The North Face's coldest pop up store 6.3 out of ten on the experiential marketing campaign.

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