The point of sale is a powerful place; it’s the point in time at which all the elements of the sale—the consumer, the money, and the product—come together.

Increasingly, there’s an additional factor to consider when thinking about this crucial moment: the mobile phone. 90% of consumers use phones when shopping at brick and mortar retail stores like 7-Eleven. In today’s day and age, consumers aren’t paying attention to floor vinyls or overhead mobiles advertising products—they’re looking at their phones.

Leveraging the Belly iPads that sit at the checkout counter, we were able to use their bluetooth capabilities to detect nearby smartphones with the Belly app and send them a push notification; a functionality known as beacons. Through the deployment of our idea, Belly instantly transformed from one of many loyalty rewards programs to the largest beacon network in the country.

Using Belly’s tablets as beacons, we sent 7-Eleven customers messages about Gatorade when they were in or walking by the store and most importantly, right when they were staring down the beverage case facing a tough choice.

For eight weeks, we used the Belly tablets as a beacon to message customers on their phones about the Summit Storm Gatorade flavor at and around the point of sale. Messages were obvious and prominent, appearing even on lock screens of a closed phone or at the top of a phone screen.

The program succeeded by all measures: boosting sales and awareness of not only Gatorade’s Summit Storm flavor, but raising sales of Gatorade overall within Belly-participating 7-Elevens.

As measured by a pre and post campaign survey of 7-Eleven shoppers in stores with Belly tablets, sales of Summit Storm more than doubled across the campaign period versus the month before. Our tactic broke through people’s phone screens and stood out in the noisy environment of a convenience store, lifting sales across all flavors, even those not explicitly mentioned in our push notification.

Through the employment of innovative and new technology, we were able to successfully remind customers that Gatorade is always the go-to choice for athletes.

We wanted to bring information about Gatorade right to the place where the decision-making occurs—the point of sale—but in a method that used the new behavior of in-store smartphone usage to our advantage.

We our solution in Belly, a universal loyalty rewards program that has tablets (iPads) in over 3,000 7-Eleven stores nationwide. A Belly user earns points for ‘checking in’ via branded iPads at the point-of-sale, earning rewards from participating stores over time. We recognized these tablets were extremely powerful in their ability to message customers.

We needed to make Gatorade’s 7-Eleven exclusive flavor, Summit Storm, stand out in a crowded retail environment. Knowing that 90% of consumers use phones when shopping retail stores, we wanted to use this behavior to our advantage.

We found our solution in Belly, a loyalty rewards program that has tablets in 7-Eleven stores. Recognizing that these tablets were extremely powerful, we used them to send shoppers notifications about Gatorade to their phones while they were in-store.

Our program cut through the clutter, boosting sales of not only Gatorade’s Summit Storm flavor, but raising sales of Gatorade overall.