When HP wanted to move beyond single-moment engagement and turn its HP Crush incentive programme into a growth engine, we helped bring HP YOUniverse to life – a live, app-connected experience that deepened product fluency, strengthened ecosystem selling and drove uplift across premium PC, volume and accessories sales.
HP Crush, HP’s brand love incentive programme had already laid strong foundations for retail engagement, with the HP Crush app, engagement streaks, push notifications and ongoing challenges to make participation measurable and motivation structured. But the next phase demanded depth, HP needed to strengthen product fluency, build confidence in selling the HP ecosystem and convert participation into in‑store performance.
Take HP Crush beyond a campaign moment and design a live experience that immerses retail teams while connecting every interaction back to the HP Crush app to create accountable, trackable behaviour change.
Born from this ambition was HP YOUniverse, the live experiential expression of HP Crush, where:
Delivering YOUniverse and expanding the scale required close coordination across venues, technology, content and engagement design so every touchpoint felt seamless.
From agenda design and delivery, rolling out an incentive and challenge, creating immersive product zones, and full event delivery, the Blue Square team managed end-to-end execution.
Our sister agency, Cyphr, created the connected app journey, guiding attendees through each zone and capturing real‑time engagement and insight.
We carefully selected four cities (London, Birmingham, Manchester and Dublin) to host the live experiences, focusing on good locations, capacity, visual impact and on-site hospitality to keep attendees in the room for longer.
Once inside YOUniverse, attendees moved through four zones, each engineered against defined HP growth drivers and anchored in hands‑on product interaction.
THE ZONES
At every zone, attendees scanned a QR code, completed a knowledge check to reinforce the key learnings and tracked their progress in real time through the HP Crush app.
Completing all the zones unlocked entry into our prize draw for a HP tech bundle worth £2.5k, with one winner announced at each location. This turned live excitement and app‑verified completion into accountable participation rather than passive attendance.
Crucially, YOUniverse was designed as the starting point of an extended engagement cycle, not the finish line. Post‑event, participants were redirected back into the HP Crush app through targeted communications and push notifications, with a programme of follow‑on activity such as competitions and quizzes to keep HP in their minds.
YOUniverse translated engagement into accountable sales behaviour and measurable ecosystem impact. Across Premium and Volume categories, event‑engaged stores consistently outperformed market benchmarks, proving YOUniverse is a scalable growth lever rather than a short-term sales spike.
HP Crush established the foundation, YOUniverse expanded the ecosystem, and HP Crush 2.0 will sustain it – transforming engagement from a campaign into infrastructure for ongoing growth.