Hanningtons, in Brighton’s North Street and coined the ‘Harrods of Brighton’, was a much loved department store, which traded for nearly 200 years until it closed in 2001.

By the time the store closed, Hanningtons had expanded from one shop to many of the units on North Street, The Lanes and East Street.

Redevco acquired the development in 2015 and started work in early 2017, unearthing areas of the oldest parts of the city that no one has seen for centuries and creating an opulent retail and leisure destination.

Redevco partnered with RamJam to help promote the development of Hanningtons Estate through innovative digital customer experience, resulting in an augmented reality wayfinding app.

Challenge

The challenge set to us was to answer 3 main points:

• Drive shoppers to the estate from around the city
• Increase dwell time within ‘Hanningtons Lane’
• Help users navigate their way through the space

Insight

From researching the challenge we found that:

• Brighton’s exciting mixture of large brands and boutique shops, artisan food and drink establishments, along with local artists’ artwork and graffiti adorning its streets makes it stand out from other cities.
• The majority of new visitors to Brighton tend to walk straight out of Brighton station and down Queens Road to the seafront, completely missing all the different sights and delights of Brighton that in particular the North Laines has to offer.
• With every smartphone user having easy access to Google Maps, people are used to navigating to a destination – though that doesn’t mean it’s the most interesting route to take, nor does it take you to places of interest that may be missed by Google.

Solution

For our solution, we focused our gamified wayfinding app to champion the creativity and uniqueness of Brighton:

• Showcase the city and all that it has to offer
• Encourage users to visit and explore
• Engage directly with users in a fun and interactive way
• Discover the hidden delights Brighton has to offer
• Guide users to predestined shops or locations
• A fun, alternative guide through the streets of Brighton

The app contained a mixture of useful information for wayfinding to specific destinations such as shops, bars and restaurants, along with a suite of sponsorable eggs to find hidden around Brighton.

When nearing an egg the user is prompted to 'Find the egg', triggering an augmented reality experience where the users looks around their surroundings through phone screen to see where it's hidden. On finding the egg the user is then prompted to tap the egg to crack it, freeing one of a limited number of collectible mascots.

Each mascot was individually sponsorable, from the egg design itself to the clothes they are wearing. To help illustrate the type of mascot it could be we developed a seagull character to tie into our local seaside setting.

We also created a bespoke 3D map of Brighton specifically for the app with recognisable landmarks modelled to help give the map a unique look and feel.