NEW YORK: Emojis have helped 1-800-Flowers, the flower and gourmet food delivery firm, engage mobile consumers in a way which reflects its core brand "mission".

Amit Shah, the company's svp/online marketing, mobile and social, drilled down into this subject at the Mobile Media Summit Upfront, an event held during Internet Week 2015 in New York City.

More specifically, he discussed a pack of mobile "stickers" that was released by the brand, and which could be used on various apps, in the run up to Mother's Day this year.

"The thing that we were trying to do is get very close to our mission," he said. (For more, including further details about this campaign, read Warc's exclusive report: Emojis deliver brand benefits for 1-800-Flowers.)

"What we wanted to do was consistent with our mission, which is helping people express themselves, and send and deliver smiles.

"We wanted to come up with something that really captured Mother's Day and allowed people to have this expression outside of sending a physical gift as well."

Such a strategy, he suggested, was the result of careful consideration from 1-800-Flowers regarding the various communications options currently fighting for supremacy on the "contested space" of mobile.

"Within that contested space, if you think about it, messaging definitely has aggregated the audience at scale. And we are talking about hundreds of millions of people," said Shah.

"So when we started really thinking about how should we really understand these mediums of expression which are establishing themselves as … this currency in this new evolving media, we were drawn to messaging."

Having decided upon messaging apps, emojis represented a natural space for 1-800-Flowers – which specialises in providing small moments of happiness – to play.

"Within messaging, I think a really interesting thing to note is that emojis are not expression-light but expression-heavy," Shah said.

"What that really means is that people are now using this medium to go a little bit deeper and [be a] little more bit more interpretive about how they exchange communications."

Data sourced from Warc