Tag Archives: Marketing

Boteco Olé – World cup Rivalry encashed for Marketing creatively

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I Don't Cry for You, Argentina

Tremendous rivalry between Latin American neighbors, Brazil and Argentina is providing inspiration to some businessmen for coming up with new creative marketing schemes.

Boteco Olé, a bar well recommended to the Cariocas to go and watch world cup soccer games, has an interesting marketing gimic. It offers free beer shots to all those who are present, when Brazil scores. Understood! So what? Well, they also have a special offer for games played by Argentina. They offer free Beer shots (or chopes as they call it), for every Goal scored against Argentina. So far rivals of Argentina have troubled the bartender just once (S.Korea Vs. Argentina)  though.   The title of this scheme is…’não choro por ti, Argentina‘ (I don’t cry for you, Argentina).   An interesting twist on Evita!

Creative Barcodes….

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Creative Barcodes

Design Barcodes from D-Barcode

In a fastcompany article, I read this fascinating story about well-designed barcodes. Since 2005, D-barcode has been creating amazing design barcodes for its customers. This is an excellent example of creativity. Creativity not just lies in bringing out a novel product but also lies in expressing the same thought in aesthetically a more pleasing way. Barcode is probably one of the most ‘un-cool’ elements in any product. But D-Barcode has converted this very mundane element into an excellent example of ‘Expression Creativity’. The concept of Expression Creativity, originally proposed by Dr. Pradip Khandwalla deals with expressing an existing idea or object in a novel and creative manner. You can check their creative barcode galleries here and here.

Marketing during Crisis : Negotiate the Un-negotiable

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David Burke Townhouse

Photo Courtsey : http://venusandmarsbars.wordpress.com/

In Harvard Law School’s newsletter ‘Negotiation’ I came across an interesting piece about David Burke Townhouse, an upmarket restaurant in New York City.  The newsletter cites an article by Katy McLaughlin in NY Times (which I can’t locate on its website). In the month of May, David Burke Townhouse adopted a creative strategy to navigate economic downturn.

The article states

“…Imagine you’re celebrating a special occasion with friends at an upscale restaurant. Soon after you take your seats, the wine director introduces himself and hands you a list of high-end bottles of wine. You notice that the prices – all in the $200 to $600 range – have been slashed through with a red pen.

“The prices on our reserve list are negotiable tonight”, the wine director says. “Would you care to make an offer on a bottle?”……….”

Wine director of the restaurant reported that at least on five bottles per night the restaurant earned more than the reservation price (the minimum that the restaurant expected).  It’s always been said that customer is always ready to pay a huge premium for additional prestige.  Possibility of quoting a high price at a posh restaurant earns you get prestige. Well, the result was that while other upmarket restaurants in Manhattan experienced about 15% decline in revenues, David Burke Townhouse’s sales was down by only about 8%.

An interesting strategy indeed!!

Source : Negotiation; Vol. 12 No.8; August 2009. Harvard Law School.

Best Buy : A Creative Caption

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I came across this photograph on engadget.  I found it quite creative and novel. It is a caption found outside a Best Buy store (I assume).

Apparantly it has been taken from twitter. Since, I am not registered on twitter, I couldn’t track the original source of the photograph. Following is the photograph (Courtsey : Engadget)

A Creative Caption

A Creative Caption

Firefox and Brainstorming

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Mozilla has effectively used public participation strategies time and again. A great example was the ‘download movement’ for Firefox 3. They released Firefox 3 on 17th June 2008 and appealed internet users all over the world to download it the same day, in order to set a record for maximum downloads in a single day.

Eventually the results were beyond what they had expected. By the time the download day had ended they had registered 8.2 million downloads, in a single day.

Now they have come up with a new project, impact mozilla.

The introductory text on the project site says that it’s an “…………….open source marketing project“. Here users are asked to submit an innovative idea to devise a marketing strategy to make sure people who download Firefox become regular users.

To ask users to suggest ways to improve products is one thing but to ask them to devise new marketing strategy is an innovative idea. On top of it, they have nicely packaged it in form of a contest. The process somehow resembles Alex Osbourne‘s Brainstorming. While developing Brainstorming technique for creative problem solving, Alex Osbourne suggested that one of the biggest hindrances to idea generation in a team is quick evaluation of an idea. Hence, while applying brainstroming technique teams are strongly advised to abstain from any sort of judgmental evaluation of ideas that have been expressed. Since, in case of “Impact Mozilla”, users suggesting ideas will mostly be working separately from the rest of the user community, the possibility of quick judgment is nil. Firefox 3 is already enjoying very positive reviews and with creative marketing strategy that would emerge from this contest, will definitely increase pressure on the leader internet explorer.