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 Marketing has much in common with a military campaign.
There is a basic strategy that is accomplished via successful missions.
Our mission was to promote a contest or drawing to create product recognition for a new
regional bottled water. This company also had another division that manufactured very
exotic custom sports cars, and they wanted to give one away as the grand prize.
To add to the challenge, they needed to hold this drawing within 90 days and still get
real value from the promotion. Because of time and budget constraints, we couldn’t
use traditional media to get our message out. So we focused directly on the consumer at
the point of purchase – we set up our campaign on the supermarket shelves.
As shoppers approach the display,
the infrared sensor triggers the recorded message.
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The stores would not allow boards or stand-up
displays and limited us to the existing shelf space occupied by the product. So, we
improvised by creating the neck danglers shown and placed them on the bottles. Then we
made the key promotional move.
We mounted infrared sensors that prompted a recorded message when the consumer approached
the display. The recorded message began with an engine revving and then the
announcer’s voice with a background sound of bubbling water:
Vroom, Vroom…“Elan Natural Waters is giving away a fabulous
Panoz Roadster. See display for details.”
The success of the promotion exceeded our wildest dreams. The client received thousands of
entries for the drawing and got the instant product recognition they wanted from the most
important source, the supermarket shopper.
The client was also happy with the cost of the
technology. The infrared units – placed in hundreds of stores – were under
$20 each. And remarkably, this promotion was accomplished within a 90-day window, without
print, radio or television advertising.
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In all marketing efforts, but especially in promotions, it
is vital to remember that your target audience is influenced by factors other than logic.
Human beings see, hear, feel, taste and have memories of life experiences. They laugh, cry
and have a range of emotions. Successful promotions almost always have a strong
appeal to psychological or human factors.
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| When our client partner asked us to
promote a new event in Hong Kong, we wanted to send the message in a clear and memorable
way. Virtually everyone has experienced
opening a fortune cookie to see what it says about their future. We leveraged this by
having several thousand cookies made with the message:
“Your destiny is to attend TransAsia ’99 in Hong Kong.”
 It was a
very successful promotion. The cookies were a great attention-getter and the tie-in to the
event in Hong Kong was a natural. People loved opening (and eating) the cookies and had
fun with the message. Since the cookies were inexpensive, we could send them to the entire
direct marketing database, which was quite large. They were also very effective when used
in displays at other events.
And most importantly, the message got through. When we tracked the awareness level of the
new show, the recognition level was very high. This is not surprising. The mind remembers
things by association. The experience of opening and reading the message inside the
cookies provided a strong association with the event in Hong Kong. Which is just what our
client wanted. |
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