Carat
Fort Collins, CO
Carat is a tool used for economic development and marketing by placemaking professionals, event producers & destination marketing organizations.
the problem
Destination marketing doesn’t always lead to measurable outcomes.
When it comes to destination marketing, it can sometimes be challenging to prove the impact. You’ll see expensive TV advertisements with little to no conversions. Events that bring tons of foot traffic, but none of it makes it into local stores. Walking tours and scavenger hunts are fun but offer very limited data on whether or not they were successful.
These are the challenges Carat has set out to solve – an application that is fun, easy to use, and provides strong incentives to use it – while providing measurable data to event producers and destination marketing organizations so they can make more informed decisions on their programs.
prescribed services
Brand Development
Market Positioning
Marketing Strategy Services
Website Development
UI / UX Design
Interface / Data Infrastructure
Market Strategy & Positioning
The check-in process and gamification elements lend itself to a playful and modern mobile experience for users. Using physical signage inside of local businesses makes it a requirement to be in-store for redemptions – a touchpoint that is unique in a digital experience.
Using carats as a digital reward / currency system makes it fun for visitors to explore physical spaces. Reward programs are fairly common, but the community rewards program is fairly niche – Carat has a unique role to fill by bridging the gap between digital and physical experiences that provide marketing & economic benefit to destinations without discouraging in-store visits.
Introducing Carat
Economic development + reward incentives + acronym = brand positioning
The brief: an application that rewards users for visiting destinations within an area, encouraging foot traffic into local businesses. Economic development, human psychology and an acronym – create, augment and reward through app technology (CARAT); Carat is the culmination of these ideas.
The name Carat, spelled after a diamond carat represents the value the application creates. The design itself depicts a carrot that represents the human psychology behind its core rewards feature while having the details of a gemstone. The leaves of the carrot represent directions on a compass, showing the idea of traveling to reach your destination. The acronym is both the quick sales pitch and an exercise in its versatility.
The User Experience
Embracing technology comes from empathy in design.
With the launch of this product, our team spent a ton of energy on the user interface and user experience (UI / UX). Modern UI / UX practices are rooted in minimalism, responsiveness and feedback from real people.
Our approach followed these principles with a mantra around empathy in our design systems. Carat is a nuanced product with multiple layers of stakeholders to please. When you start with the end user first and work your way up the chain, you land on user experience that will encourage adoption that is bottom-up, reducing the need for extensive marketing budgets on local community programs.
website Development
Dynamic New Systems for Web Development
Carat’s website is built with a headless CMS and database infrastructure.
Carat’s website had some challenging web requirements that had us working outside the usual developer tools we build our other sites with. There were three primary challenges we wanted to address during the development process:
Database Integration
Mobile First
Tailored Experiences
The Carat website was built from scratch with each of these features core to the experience. Database integration was critical to read content that is being displayed with the mobile application. The site was designed as mobile first, since the bulk of the users visiting the website will be seeing it on a phone. Since the application is a platform for tailored experiences and events, the website needed to incorporate a similar format. Case studies, landing pages and customized webpages are built into our website’s infrastructure for seamless and automated content integrations.
Carat APP Launch
Introducing Carat
Launched at Downtown Colorado Inc.’s IN THE GAME Conference
To kickoff Carat in grand fashion, we worked with the fine folks at Downtown Colorado Inc. on using the platform as their conference app – highly tailored to their IN THE GAME Conference in downtown Colorado Springs, CO. With over 75 destinations that rewarded visitors with over 3,000 carats over the course of the 4-day event, DCI’s team was thrilled to showcase the strength of the platform. For a complete write-up on the conference, check out the case study at the link below.
At the conference, one of our principals, Cody Johnson, spoke on the importance of proving your commitment to local businesses, giving a clear use case for the Carat platform to downtowns and community-driven marketing organizations. Working with place branding expert Jenny Starkey of Starkey Strategies, the two delivered some sobering thoughts on the experience economy with methods of building measurable data into your marketing strategy.
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