Case Study: Winning With Location-Based Marketing
An illustrative 2009 scenario of a local retailer testing check-in marketing right as Foursquare launched, and what drove foot traffic.
Foursquare launched in March 2009 and, within its first year, turned “checking in” at a location into a small ritual for an early crowd of tech-forward users in cities like New York and Austin. It wasn’t the first location-based service, Google Latitude and a handful of SMS-based check-in tools existed already, but Foursquare made the game mechanics (badges, mayorships, points) the hook that got people to use it in public, repeatedly. That combination is what made location-based marketing worth testing for small local businesses that year, and it’s worth walking through a realistic example of how one might have approached it.
The setup. Picture an independent coffee shop in a neighborhood with a growing population of the kind of early adopters who’d already downloaded Foursquare. The owner had no marketing budget to speak of, most of what she’d tried (a local newspaper ad, a flyer run) had produced no measurable lift. She noticed a few customers “checking in” on their phones without prompting and decided to see if she could turn that into something deliberate.
What she tried first. She claimed the venue on Foursquare, added a description and hours and offered a free pastry to whoever held the “mayor” title, the badge given to the most frequent check-in visitor at a location. This cost nothing but the pastry itself. Within a few weeks, a small core of regulars started checking in more often specifically to compete for mayorship, and some of them posted their check-ins to Twitter, which was still novel enough that friends noticed and asked what it was.
What didn’t work. She also tried a blanket “check in and get 10% off” offer for all customers. It barely moved traffic, most people at the register weren’t on Foursquare yet, and the offer required explaining the app to people who’d never heard of it. Compared to the mayorship incentive, which rewarded people already using the platform, the blanket discount targeted the wrong audience for where adoption stood in 2009.
What the mayorship tactic delivered. It wasn’t a flood of new customers, the total addressable audience on Foursquare in a single neighborhood was still small that year. What it did was deepen loyalty among a handful of existing customers who became visible advocates. Their Twitter posts brought in a slow trickle of curious first-time visitors who asked staff about the “free pastry app thing.” The lift was modest in raw numbers but essentially free to produce, and it built habits (both the app usage and the loyalty) that carried into 2010 as Foursquare’s user base grew.
The lesson underneath it. Location-based marketing in 2009 wasn’t yet a mass-market channel, and treating it as one (discounting to everyone) undersold the actual opportunity, which was rewarding the small group of highly engaged early users who would talk about the experience unprompted. The businesses getting real value from check-in marketing that year weren’t running promotions at scale, they were running small, cheap experiments aimed squarely at the sliver of their customer base already carrying the technology and the habit.
For a local business weighing whether to bother with a brand-new platform, the honest takeaway is that timing and audience fit mattered more than the size of the offer. A free pastry to the right five people did more than a discount blasted at five hundred people who’d never open the app.
Keep exploring: browse more Marketing Strategy guides, see everything we published in 2009 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
