Case Study
Interactive Digital Game to Launch a New Hiking Shoe
A location-based gamified marketing campaign that drove engagement across New York City and Denver, delivered in just six weeks for Merrell's next-generation hiking shoe launch
Challenge
The Challenge
Merrell shoes sought novel and innovative ways to market its next-generation hiking shoe. Specifically, Merrell was looking for a new marketing tactic that exemplified its mission to enable outdoor exploration and helped to generate buzz in a fun, interactive way.
The project came with significant constraints. R2 had only six weeks before the campaign launch to design, develop, and deploy a fully functional application. The solution needed to be a web application rather than a native mobile app to maximize accessibility and avoid app store approval delays.
To enable dynamic challenges and content updates throughout the campaign, R2 realized that a second administrative application would be required. This meant delivering two complete applications within the tight timeline while maintaining quality, aesthetics, and functionality.
Approach
The Approach
With a tight timeline of only six weeks before the campaign launch, R2 needed to devise a solution that was implementable in the time allotted while not sacrificing quality, aesthetics, or functionality.
R2 chose to build the user application as a Progressive Web App, providing native app-like experience without the delays of app store submissions. The administrative application was developed as a traditional web application for internal use by the Merrell marketing team.
Starting with only a conceptual mockup design comprising the UI aesthetic and elements, R2's UX/UI design team moved quickly. In less than a week, R2 designed both the user app and the administrative application UI to dynamically power challenges and content through the user application.
The parallel development approach allowed the team to work on both applications simultaneously, with the admin app enabling real-time content updates to the user-facing game.
Solution
User Application
The user application was developed as a Progressive Web Application focused on allowing users to take different challenges to earn points and level up to one of three tiers. Each tier would equate to different prizes that users could earn.
The app included an interactive tutorial upon registration that allowed new users to tour the app and quickly learn how to get the most out of it. This onboarding experience ensured users could immediately engage with challenges.
Challenges were location-based and focused on New York City and the Denver/Boulder metropolitan area. The app provided users with three different challenge types: Social challenges allowed users to take images while performing an outdoor activity which could then be uploaded to Instagram and Facebook. Outdoor challenges utilized geolocation to allow users to take on hiking-related challenges for popular trails and locations, checking in once their mobile phone was located within a specific radius from the challenge start point. Retail challenges incentivized users to check into retail locations based on latitude and longitude coordinates.
Upon completing any challenge type, users were met with a fun challenge completed animation and immediately received their challenge points, creating instant gratification and encouraging continued engagement.
Solution
Administrative Application
The administrative application enabled challenges to be created dynamically, as well as specific types of content. This gave the Merrell marketing team complete control over the campaign without requiring developer involvement.
Once administrators authenticated, they could create, update, or delete challenges. Each challenge comprised a geolocation (unless marked as a social challenge), a challenge description, a challenge location tag (either NYC or Denver), and a challenge image. As soon as the challenge creation or modification was saved, it dynamically appeared in the user application.
The administrative application also allowed administrators to see critical user data and export the data for analysis and reporting. This enabled the marketing team to track campaign performance in real-time.
The final feature of the administrative application was a KPI dashboard to visualize key performance indicators, providing at-a-glance insights into user engagement, challenge completion rates, and overall campaign success.
Details
The Results
R2 delivered both applications on time for the October 2022 launch. The apps were well-tested and bug-free, ensuring a smooth experience for users from day one.
The technical implementation featured MongoDB database, Ionic 5.0 Framework, Node.js backend, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk with S3 for scalable cloud infrastructure. The application achieved full device compatibility across mobile, tablet, laptop, and desktop, with discoverability on all major search engines including Google, Bing, Edge, and DuckDuckGo.
Users could authenticate via Google, Facebook, or by creating an account with email and one-time passcode, minimizing friction for new user registration.
The app scaled seamlessly with a growing user base throughout the six-week launch campaign. The gamified approach successfully drove engagement and buzz around the new hiking shoe launch.
The campaign's success was recognized at the highest levels, contributing to the CMO winning an award for the innovative marketing approach. This project demonstrated how creative technology solutions can transform traditional product launches into interactive brand experiences.