Food and beverage outlets attract travelers at Copenhagen Airport with digital signage
The Challenge
The food service giant Select Service Partner (SSP) operates food and beverage stores in more than 140 airports and almost 300 railway stations around the world. In total, SSP’s 26,000 employees serve about 250 million customers a year.
In Denmark, SSP operates food and beverage stores located in high-traffic areas, including the country’s largest airport, Copenhagen Airport. At Copenhagen Airport SSP’s food and beverage stores depend entirely on the flow of passengers passing through the terminals. The number of passengers has been decreasing since the financial crisis started, and in September 2009, passenger numbers had dropped by 6.9 percent compared to the year before. The reduced customer base makes it more important than ever for SSP to market its products with maximum impact. That is why SSP plans to boost sales with a Scala-based digital signage solution from Denmark-based Scala Certified Partner Web500. Web500 already operates successful digital signage solutions in SSP’s Danish Monarch and Domino’s Pizza restaurants.
The Solution
Copenhagen Airport is known for its strict sign policy and its high standard of design aesthetics. These requirements challenged SSP to find a quality solution that would provide both appealing design and a functional technical network. The network needed to include seven food and beverage stores, each with its own brand and graphic identity. A digital signage solution had to deliver dynamic marketing based on a local and sales-oriented store level in addition to higher level campaigns across the different stores. SSP also wanted the stores themselves to be able to adjust marketing related to their stock, local preferences, temporary employee absence and more.
Today SSP has 33 screens and 14 players at Copenhagen Airport. Since seven different brands exist, the screen set-up varies from one screen to eight screen walls.
The Benefit
SSP expects that the digital signage network can help to reverse the sales drop caused by the global financial crisis. The digital signage solution provides new and more efficient opportunities to manage campaigns, pricing and sales. Scala gives SSP a unique opportunity to influence customers in the store, based on customer flow and other variables at different times of the day.
A test of product spots in two of SSP’s stores at Copenhagen Airport has already shown that digital signage can provide a significant ROI, helping to bring SSP above the declining market.
“The decrease in the number of travelers affects our stores at Copenhagen Airport because fewer travelers mean fewer customers,” says Flemming Christophersen, Marketing Manager at SSP Denmark. “It is now more important than ever to market our products with maximum impact, and we expect that our Scala solution from Web500 will do just that.”
One of the major reasons SSP chose Web500 to develop the network is that the Scala software platform and Samsung screens provide Web500 with the opportunity to meet the high standards of quality and design that Copenhagen Airport requires.
“This solution allows SSP to carry out the potential of a dynamic, future-oriented digital signage solution that makes it easy and efficient to handle multiple brands at multiple organization levels,” says Lars Kanstrup, creative manager of Web500. “SSP is now able to promote each individual store on a local basis or manage more general campaigns across all of its brands.”