Looking for some creative inspiration? Check out the “Generous Store”
Posted by joeDanish Chocolatier Anthon Berg created a special pop-up store in Copenhagen, Denmark. At this store, customers couldn’t pay for their boxes of chocolate with cash, they paid instead with good deeds. Each product was labeled with a deed the customer had to perform – like “Serve breakfast in bed to your loved one” or “Help clean a friend’s house.” Customers posted their promised “payment” on their Facebook page right in the store — helped by staff carrying around iPads. Think about all the promotion operating here: the store served as a billboard, the Facebook posts as advertising, and the positive media coverage as great publicity. All of these tactics reinforced Anthon Berg’s desired positioning as a generous and socially conscious brand. Brilliant!
The video below was put out by the ad agency, Robert/Boison, so you can get a behind the scenes look. I hope this inspires your creativity this summer day.
This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2012 at 7:59 am and is filed under Advertising, Positioning, Price, Promotion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Anthon Berg went beyond the typical marketing scheme and sold an idea that sold their product. The idea of buying their chocolate with generous deeds sparked mass media attention. They held people accountable by using Facebook to post the generous deeds and they encouraged them to post photos of them doing these generous deeds. This is an amazingly brilliant way of getting publicity and spreading the news by word of mouth. Within 24 hours of Anthon Berg’s experiment 20,000 people had posted pictures of their generous acts. There were multiple other media venues that were affected within hours as well, such as YouTube, local radio, news website, and even the newspaper. They had over 100,000 people visit the store, all in the 5 hours it was open, but there must have been millions that they reached by means of social media. In today’s cultural society, multi media is the fastest way to spread an idea or product. In this case Anthon Berg was doing both. They used the idea of being generous to tie in with their product. Anthon Berg’s reasoning behind this experiment was giving their customers, or new customers, a reason to buy the chocolate not only for themselves, but for others. It is also a way of getting involved in the community and showing that they want to better society.
September 26th, 2012 at 8:16 pmJust the simple idea of selling chocolate for good deeds was something that set them apart from other chocolate distributors. Facebook was definitely a great tool to not only guarantee that the buyer performed the good deed, but the store was advertised through Facebook by the buyer. Berg definitely took customer value to a whole new level not only was the benefit of the product greater than the cost, but the cost itself was beneficial to the buyer as well as the recipient of the good deed. The need itself was not the chocolate but the deeds Berg was looking outside the box of customer satisfaction. The news spread about the Generous store through many different venues, in a small amount of time for the Five hours that it was open, I think that Berg left a mark in marketing because of the attention it was given in almost any for of mass media.
September 27th, 2012 at 8:49 pm