The Copper & Breathalyser Road Respect Pop-Up Shop

Added: 25th June 2014

Independent Events have continued their successful Road Respect campaigns by bringing a brand new pop-up shop to the Gateshead based intu Metrocentre.

The FIFA world cup is currently taking place and it is an event that brings out the best of the nation’s spirit. Whilst the vast majority of the public are sensible enough to get a taxi home from the pub, there is unfortunately a small minority who elect to drive under the influence of alcohol. Independent Events have therefore decided to use the World Cup campaign as an opportunity to raise awareness, utilising the popular wave of pop-up shops within retail to do so and combining face to face experiential events with online marketing.

The Road Respect shop based in the intu Metrocentre has been designed to include many different experiential activities that are designed to increase customer engagement. The driving simulators provide an insight as to how alcohol impairs judgement and reaction times, and are very popular with the public. We are also running a competition alongside this to see who could get the best ‘sober score’ which includes free giveaways for the highest scorers. This is scored out of 100 and the current highest scorer is an exemplary 95/100. Furthermore, we run other competitions asking customers to guess the number of units in the average pint of lager. This is supplemented with the chance to win £60 worth of free fuel, further encouraging customers to take part. 

Customers are also asked to wear beer goggles whilst competing in a penalty shootout, in order to create greater content across various social media platforms such as Vine and Instagram. The activity shows how alcohol can impair different senses such as vision, which is essential whilst behind the wheel. With many photo opportunities on offer and by using the #PlayItSafe hashtag across the board on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and more, we hope that the activity can create an educational experience for customers, whilst still being fun at the same time.

One of our most popular ideas was the distribution of world cup masks. The masks are very realistic looking and it is a fun touch to see lots of Steven Gerrard look-a-likes shopping around the intu Metrocentre. This served as an indirect advertising strategy, which inspired curiosity in other shoppers which led them to our shop.

The overall aim is to get customers engaged with the educational content we are providing. As always we try to make it as fun as possible as the customer is more likely to engage and retain content when they associate it with having a good time. On a whole, we believe this is being achieved as the shop is continuously busy with many happy customers stating that the event had been an educational experience for them. We hope to take the Road Respect campaign to other areas; in order to spread the information to a wider demographic and hopefully, reduce alcohol related driving incidents in local communities.

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