Jiepang, the Chinese equivalent to Foursquare, revealed today some interesting progress in the company’s utilization of LBS service as a new marketing channel via its long-time partnership with Starbucks.
The Beijing-based startup launched a Valentine’s Day campaign in joint force with Starbucks to award Jiepang users who check into a Starbucks store in eastern China together with a friend within 3 hours with a branded redeemable Valentine’s Day badge. Some 20,000 users collected the badge with friends or new fellows they just met through Jiepang recommendation. In addition to this, last year, Jiepang released a viral video, couple badge and match-making in-store postcards, intended to encourage users hangout at Starbucks stores, and had successfully ignited a buzz on major social networks in China.
The coming of LBS/O2O heat in China enables so many vibrant and varied opportunities for companies to tap for innovative and low-cost marketing, in an unprecedented way. The Starbucks-Jiepang tieup of LBS checkin awards is one nice example of such practices. Other services, like Dianping and Weixin, dived into the same area with similar approaches of mobile loyalty program as well.
Jiepang also launched a new version of its app during Chinese New Year on both iOS and Andorid, users will be able to see people who have been to this location recently, as well as nearby popular places after each check-in.
Currently Jiepang boasts about 4.3 million users – mostly are fashionable youngsters – in mainland China, Hongkong and Taiwan and has partnered with more than 9000 chain, medium and small businesses.
Image credit: Jiepang.com