5 Ways To Make Marketing Part Of Real Life

“Think out of the box!” may be good advice for creative marketers. But it’s been said so often that it’s become a meaningless catch phrase.

“Think off of the page (or the screen)!” is better advice, because it overcomes some of the traditional limitations of marketing communications. Even the wildest idea gets tamed, when it has to work within the confines of a page or a screen.

Here are five examples of thinking off the page, showing how to make marketing happen in real life, not just in the artificial environment of communications media.

1. Do it in the road.
Zappos “exposed” its expansion beyond shoes into a full line of clothing, by hiring a naked man to run through high traffic locations in New York City.

2. Do it at dinner.
A Sarah Palin Lookalike Contest helped University of Massachusetts food service tie in with Alaskan Seafood Week.

3. Take to the air.
German publisher Eichborn Verlag used mini-banners attached to live house flies to build traffic to their booth at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

4. Up your nose.
To get beyond conventional sight and sound in marketing communications, the Scent Marketing Institute helps companies use “scent as part of multi-sensory marketing strategies to enhance customers’ experiences of a location and its products or services.”

5.  Threaten your customers.
Some ideas should stay in the box – this prank promotion inspired a $10 million lawsuit. Instead of offering benefits, an imaginary Toyota spokesperson e-mailed potential customers that he was fleeing from the police and coming to their house with a pit bull.

Tags: food service, prank marketing, Sarah Palin, scent marketing, trade show, zappos

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Cool/Funny/Unusual, Fred Petrick, Marketing Communications. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.