Cover Story: Advancing to the Next Level

Channel Agnostic
At the core of GameStop's marketing strategy is providing the best retail experience possible for consumers, regardless of channel. GameStop prides itself on having store associates that are knowledgeable about the games they're selling, because in most cases they're passionate gamers themselves. With 45,000 employees scattered over 6,600 stores in 17 countries worldwide, that's no easy task.

"What I've seen, which is commendable to GameStop, is that it has this enormously successful traditional retail business," says Michael Evans, vice president of Pariveda Solutions, an IT consulting company that has worked extensively with GameStop. "It's still investing in its stores, but at the same time accelerating its efforts in being able to deliver digital content, as that becomes a bigger reality in the marketplace."

In addition to its extensive brick-and-mortar presence, GameStop has a robust e-commerce site, which was relaunched on Nov. 1. It now ranks behind only Amazon.com as the largest online game retailer, and is the fastest growing website in the gaming space, with sites in seven countries and more rollouts planned. GameStop's online sales more than doubled in the third quarter of 2010, and as of press time the site was averaging over 30 million visitors a month. Those visitors viewed over 200 million pages per month and spent an average of five minutes on the site per session.

GameStop's website frequently serves as a research tool for visitors, who take the opportunity to view a game's graphics via on-site video, check the availability of a game, link to Kongregate for the opportunity to try a game for free, among other tasks. But ultimately the majority of GameStop's sales are captured in-store. With this information in mind, GameStop simplified the process for its customers by launching a buy online, pick up in-store program. PickUp@Store launched in November of last year.

"We look at pick up in-store as not only about creating a better multichannel retail experience, but as another initial step for us in fulfilling our digital business strategy," notes Freeman. "Creating integration across channels allows our customers to shop and buy where and how they want."

Loyalty Yields Data
GameStop was busy in the fall of last year: In addition to the launch of PickUp@Store, the retailer debuted its PowerUp Rewards loyalty program in October. Consumers sign up for the free program at their local GameStop store and get a membership card to start accumulating points. Rewards points are earned through purchases or by trading in used games or systems. The points can then be spent on GameStop's PowerUp rewards catalog, which can be found on the retailer's website.

The loyalty program has proven both quite popular with GameStop's customers and profitable for the brand. Loyalty members are shopping with GameStop three times more often than nonmembers, and now account for 10 percent of all GameStop.com purchases. They're also activating their membership by building game libraries on GameStop's site (which now has over 20 million games in its libraries), allowing the retailer to market and recommend games to those customers in unique ways.