Six Successful Pop-Up Activations

Pop-up activations are a great way to showcase your brand’s products, look, feel, and values. Here’s how six brands partnered with Promobile to connect with target audiences nationwide.

The Brand: Amika

The Strategy: Create Immersive Experiences

Haircare brand Amika recently conducted two activations — a mobile sampling campaign and a pop-up shop — offering colorful, immersive experiences that let participants explore the brand’s products and identity.

For the mobile sampling campaign, Amika took its “frizz mobile” to four cities known for humid weather to give away samples of its new anti-frizz treatment, Smooth Over. The tour centered around a truck decked out in vivid colors and the same fonts as the product’s packaging, plus a shaded footprint with fun, comfy seating. The combination created a friendly, inviting setting for consumers to learn about the new product as they picked up free samples and talked to brand ambassadors.

Amika’s pop-up shop, staged in several cities, created a fun, friendly immersion into the brand’s sensory world. Participants learned about the brand’s range of products as they picked up samples and spoke with brand ambassadors. The pop-up featured color-saturated bathroom-themed vignettes, perfect for a product typically used in the shower or tub. As they posed for selfies in a vividly blue tub or orange-hued shower, participants literally immersed themselves in the cheerful, Amika-colored fantasy and created images worth sharing on social media.

The Brand: Tazo

The Strategy: Borrow Some Celebrity Buzz

To promote the Café Collective — a network supporting local, independent cafes — beverage brand Tazo teamed up with Promobile and Issa Rae, a producer, actor and entrepreneur, to launch an LA sampling pop-up.

Centered around a new, curated drink, the Tazo Passion Twist, the event invited indie shop owners to join the Tazo Cafe Collective, which celebrates independent cafes and the role they play in their communities.

One hundred swag bags and 1,000 Passion Twist recipe cards rounded out the offerings, which served more than 300 community members and shop owners.

The Brands: Butterball and BFF

The Strategy: Celebrate a Holiday and Teach New Skills

A pop-up dinner experience gave New Yorkers without holiday plans a place to eat, learn, and make new friends. Hosted by poultry brand Butterball and matchmaking site Bumble for Friends, the “Friendsgiving”-themed event turned a simple premise — no one should be alone for Thanksgiving — into a pop-up dinner experience designed to encourage mingling along with dining. Custom-designed by Promobile, the space featured a cheerful yellow, blue, and white color scheme and small tables for guests to congregate around. A professional friendship coach and conversation starters scattered throughout the room eased the flow of conversation, while culinary influencers and experts gave live cooking demonstrations and shared cooking tips and techniques with participants.

The Brands: Sunscoop & Supergoop

The Strategy: Partnering up for Summer Fun

Ice cream brand Sunscoop and sunscreen brand Supergoop formed a summertime partnership to promote both brands — a logical fit, since both ice cream and sunscreen are hot-weather staples. For the mobile activation, Promobile customized vintage-style ice cream trucks and created an exterior footprint around each truck, complete with music and custom displays. The roadshow delivered more than 53,000 sunscreen samples and some 16,000 ice cream samples in NYC, the Hamptons, Chicago, and LA.

The Brand: Kettle & Fire

The Strategy: Storytelling

Bone broth brand Kettle & Fire wanted to tell a thought-provoking story about America’s flawed food system in a way that would resonate with consumers. But that’s a complex, nuanced topic, one that spans many decades and covers a lot of ground scientifically, socially, and commercially. How could they deliver that information in a way that would stick in visitors’ minds?

Working with Promobile, the brand created a pop-up–activation hybrid event that would literally walk participants through the story and highlight a pledge made by the brand and its partners to work toward a happier, healthier future.

Staged in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood, the six-part experience led guests through a multi-part installation that was educational, multisensory, and fully immersive.

Upon arrival, guests received a broth sample to taste, then were ushered into a mock grocery store where they shined flashlights on shelves stocked with traditional Thanksgiving items; blacklight text revealed the herbicides and additives in seemingly wholesome foods. On a lifesize projection wall, guests learned about changes in farming practices over the last 100 years, then explored how meat, chicken, and vegetables have changed in ways that reduce nutrient density. The journey concluded on a hopeful — and delicious — note, with a luxurious table set with a wholesome Thanksgiving menu curated by a chef/influencer. On the way out, guests passed through a curated pantry showcasing sustainability-minded brands.

The Brand: Lemon Perfect

The Strategy: Sampling

Sampling is a time-tested, research-proven way to entice customers to try a new or unfamiliar product. Enter flavored-water brand Lemon Perfect, which used sampling to boost brand awareness and set itself apart from other enhanced-water brands. Seven markets with high concentrations of Lemon Perfect’s target audience — diverse, health-focused young consumers — for a series of activations. Promobile designed and launched a fleet of branded vehicles for the tour, which took the product directly to markets primed for a new hydration option: Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Success came immediately; in just 51 days the activation distributed more than 300,000 samples and gained access to millions of new customers.

Promobile Marketing is a dynamic experiential marketing agency based in New York City. For over a decade, Promobile Marketing has collaborated with a range of brands—from budding startups to major CPG brands—on immersive marketing campaigns. Get in touch to discuss your next project.