Bloomingdale's Focuses on Instagram Community With New Holiday Campaign

In an effort to boost its presence on the social platform, Bloomingdale’s has launched a new campaign that focuses on its Instagram following.

For the campaign, Bloomingdale’s created 16 new Instagram accounts in order to make large, mosaic-style images comprised of individual pictures. Each image is a set of four pictures tied together by a common theme, resembling a game of I Spy. Clicking on different quadrants brings users to a zoomed-in – hence the name of the campaign, Zoomingdales – closer look linked to a page on Bloomingdales.com where all the pictured items are grouped together.

The move by Bloomingdale’s to create an interactive Instagram activity follows a similar one from Ted Baker earlier this month.

“Obviously this is a very noisy time of year on social media – all the brands are ramping up the cadence of their publishing and the promotional nature of their messages,” says Jonathan Paul, operating vice president of social media at Bloomingdale’s. “It’s tough to stand out in that cacophony of marketing, so we wanted to do something that’s kind of a thumbstopper.”

Bloomingdale’s unveiled its first Zoomingdales image last Friday, depicting four different potential holiday parties: the fancy party, the office party, the casual potluck, and New Year’s Eve at Times Square. The second image, Naughty or Nice, was posted on Monday and features a variety of items, from a black leather motorcycle jacket to a conservative strand of pearls.

“We really have everything under the sun and I’m sort of calling this the encyclopedic assortment of Bloomingdale’s,” Paul says. “We’re trying to bring that to life in a really visceral and visual way; that’s what we’re trying to do with this campaign.”

Sean O’Neal, president of Adaptly, an online platform for social media buying, thinks the campaign does a good job of that, while also providing an innovative and fun alternative to the typical retail catalog.

“Will retailers continue to see ROI on physical printed catalogs as the world continues to digitize and autonomous marketing platforms like Instagram and Pinterest enable retailers to deliver more remarkable experiences to their customers?” O’Neal asks. “I think we are looking at the future of retail marketing.”

Bloomingdale’s has 211,000 Instagram followers, as opposed to 277,000 Twitter and more than 362,000 Facebook fans. The retailer is focusing on the photo-sharing platform – even hiring Alice Gao, a New York City photographer with a massive Instagram following of her own, to shoot the products for this campaign – because while the audience isn’t its largest, it is by far the most engaged.

“People who follow us on Instagram have really great taste,” Paul adds. “The stuff I like most that we publish, our users resoundingly agree.”

There will be two more Zoomingdales images before Christmas. The next one, which will be posted in the next few days, will focus on the four overturned bags of a techie, a foodie, a fitness fanatic, and a mom on the go.

Homepage image via Shutterstock.