The Difference Between Selling And Just Showing Off

You’d think that a retail marketer with 36,000+ stores would know how to turn online promotion for a low-ticket product into sales action in the store. And that a high tech marketer would be more likely to make big marketing mistakes, trying to create a sales-building shopper experience for a high-ticket product.

But you’d be wrong.

7-Eleven does it wrong. Their “Wake Up To A Hot Brazilian” online promotion for coffee is a classic example of creativity for its own sake, getting carried away with cleverness and technical wizardry without actually trying to sell anything. While Hewlett Packard does it right. Their movie theater lobby sampling/demo for its HP Photosmart Premium/Touchsmart Web printer lets best prospects get their hands on the product, and then gives them strong incentives to buy.

Customers can visit The 711 Club, a virtual nightclub in Rio de Janeiro, where they can try out pickup lines on other patrons, to earn a downloadable coupon for a cup of real world 7-Eleven Brazilian Bold coffee. But then marketing reality intrudes:
•    How anyone is supposed to know that The 711 Club exists at all is a mystery. There’s no evidence of any traffic-building activity to the site, or the store.
•    The offer is disguised so well that it might as well not even be there. Copy says, “wake up to a hot Brazilian.” But it doesn’t say anything like “get a free (or discounted) coffee at 7-Eleven.”
•    The whole process of pickup lines and earning points on the Mojo Meter is drawn out and laborious, just to get a coffee coupon.
•    There’s no in-store POS presence for the program, at least in the locations we checked.
•    The whole thing seems like overkill, for motivating the simple familiar behavior of running into a C-store for a cup of coffee.

Go where the customers are
By contrast, the HP program is a perfect example of how to “sample” a product that doesn’t usually lend itself to sampling, because it costs around $400.
•    Knowing that customers couldn’t get hands-on with their printer online, and that most people just don’t visit Office Depot that often, HP went where the customers are: Movie theater lobbies in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego, Miami and Houston.
•    POS and holographic 3-D kiosks turned lobbies into HP live demonstrations, complete with a $50 coupon distribution to drive retail traffic for the printer.
•    During off hours, HP used the theaters to train sales personnel from Best Buy, Target, Walmart, Staples and Office Depot.
•    A tie-in with Fandango even allowed consumer to print out movie tickets.

As more and more marketing moves online, everyone wants to show off, to do the cool digital stuff. They forget that it’s still the down and dirty stuff in the non-virtual world that makes so many of the sales.

Tags: 7-Eleven, 711 Club, Brazilian Bold, demonstrations, Hewlett Packard, movie theater, promotion, sampling, Touchsmart Web printer

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Alan Maites, Cool/Funny/Unusual, Marketing Communications, Robinson & Maites, promotion. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.