Missing the mark with Marketing

Posted on July 11, 2011 by robdavy

I’m a big fan of guerilla marketing. The kind of marketing that makes you think, makes you engaged, makes you want to know more. Billboards, radio spots, flyers, etc are all fine and have a place, but doing something different is always cool.

Which is why I was curious about a mysterious grey box that appeared on a concrete pedestal outside a house on Stony Plain Road a few weeks ago.

At first it was just a grey box. No writing, just a box. I thought it was an art piece of some description (each to their own!), but then in late June a date appeared on it. I say a date, because I assume it was a date. It said “07.01″. I always thought in Canada we put the day followed by the month, but hey, I’m foreign, what do I know?

True enough, on July 1st a URL appeared under the date.

(sorry for the quality, taken with my beat-up iPhone)

www.greybox.ca

That’s what it looked like anyway. Made sense too. A grey box with greybox.ca on it.
I thought I saw something a little weird on the .ca, but driving past at 50km/hr looking at a word 3″ tall, the mind helps fill in the gaps, and I decided it was greybox.ca.

Quick visit on my iPhone (not while driving, honest) to greybox.ca…

(obviously not my iPhone…)

Hmmm, that’s weird. Why would someone got the trouble of advertising a GoDaddy holding page? Maybe their DNS hasn’t propagated yet or something.

On my way home, I took another, closer look. By this time I’ve noticed 2 more of these grey boxes on Stony Plain Road.

Wait a second…! That’s not a .ca, it’s an awfully similar, but importantly different .co

The website is www.greybox.co

Why would some be using the domain extension for Columbia for their website?

So eventually I make it to their real website, something I’d imagine a lot of people wouldn’t manage. See, the thing about a guerilla marketing campaign, is that they tread a fine line with regards to how much work you can make the viewer do before they get bored. This is especially true when you’re relying on people’s curiosity to the get them to do something (in this case, visit a website). Up until this point, people have no idea why they’re visiting the website, just that it’s mentioned on a weird box on the side of the road. That’s probably enough to get them to visit it, but probably not enough to get them to get over the fact they landed on a GoDaddy landing page full of ads.

Anyway, I’m now at their real website. I still have no idea why I’m here, so I’m hoping it will become obvious very soon.

Hmmmm.

That’s a fancy login box. But doesn’t tell me anything about why I’m here.

Turns out you have the hit the somewhat un-obvious arrow on the right to see some brief pages about their product. I’m still not entirely sure what their product is. Some kind of blogging platform? It keeps talking about writing and community, expressing yourself, etc. Not sure.

But it is $35 a year…

No idea what you get for $35/year mind you, but they want your credit card details!

So what can we learn from all this?

  • Guerilla marketing can be a great way to get attention.
    Thousands of people will have seen the mysterious grey boxes on the side of the road. Building suspense with the (mis-formed) dates is a good way of keeping people interested.
  • Domain names and their extensions are important.
    greybox.ca is a great domain for this campaign. Shame it’s not the domain used in the campaign.
    I once ran a very successful campaign with signs on the side of the road that just said “HorseSummerCamps.com”. Simple domain name, told you exactly what it was about and where to find out more information.
    Using a .co domain name instead of a .com or .ca domain name was a mistake. Even going with something like BigGreyBox.com would have been better.
  • Landing pages matter.
    The landing page of a website is the page that people ‘land on’ when they first visit your website, usually the home page. You have precious seconds to do a few things with your landing page:
    a) show people they’re in the right place
    b) convince them to stay
    c) tell them what they need to know to feel comfortable buying your product (or give them a way to get that information).
    Giving them a login box and an un-intuitive navigation system is not a good way to do any of those things.
  • You need to explain and sell your product
    People will not just hand over their credit card information without a good reason (surprise surprise). You need to show people what they’re buying, and why they should buy it. greybox.co does give people a 30 day trial, but you still need to give your credit card details to get it. There’s a growing trend (a good one) at the moment for websites to allow you to trial their services without giving credit card details.

The people behind greybox.co missed a great opportunity here in my opinion. Almost all the pieces were in place for a mini version of the very successful Southgate-Centre re-opening campaign (you know the one, with the cryptic dates on the side of the road). But somewhere along the way it all fell apart and you’re just left with a marketing mess.

Shame really.

I can’t see it happening, but Grey Box, if you want some help with your marketing, contact me? rob@robdavy.com

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Rent a car wash?

Posted on February 13, 2011 by robdavy

Want to rent a car wash on Jasper Ave for $11,000/month

http://edmonton.kijiji.ca/c-housing-commercial-Bubbles-Building-Land-Jasper-Avenue-For-Lease-W0QQAdIdZ256415838#

Gotta clean a lot of cars to make that kind of money!

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How signs can make or break your business

Posted on January 24, 2011 by robdavy

I was getting some lunch from a certain Kentucky based Chicken fryer at the weekend when I noticed a donair place near the store.

“Top Donair” is it’s name.

Why did a random donair place catch my eye? Because it almost didn’t…

Let’s take a look at some successful fast food businesses:

What do they all have in common? You can’t miss them! Huge signs, huge branding. Now let’s look at Top Donair again…

What do you notice? Yep, of the available 200 sq ft of empty wall above the windows, their sign takes up… 20 of them. 10% of the available space has been used for their sign. What a waste.

Now, signs are expensive! That sign, installed, was probably $2500. A big sign like some of the ones above could easily be $10,000+. But I honestly think it’d be worth it.

You can see this all the time with small independent food places. They try and save a buck by being cheap on what they regard as un-important things. “Yeh, I’ve got a sign, what about it? People are coming for the food!”. Except they won’t know that you even sell food without a decent sized sign!

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Flash Deals Launches

Posted on January 19, 2011 by robdavy

If you’ve been listening to the radio recently (at least Hot 107), you’ll surely have heard of Flash Deal dot ca. They’re one of the latest players in the ever expanding group-buying-groupon-clone market.

They launched today with their first deal: $10 for Steak Dinner for 10 people at The Canadian Brew House. They sold out (100 purchases) at 7.45am, which is particularly impressive as the email about it went out at 6.02am.

So, few observations about the particular deal…

The Fine Print
As with all these kinds of deals, there’s fine print, but usually it’s not very relevant or interesting. I found this deals fine print interesting for a few reasons…

First, it’s only valid at peak hours. Thur-Sat, 4pm onwards. Why? If you’re going to give away the house for free, which they really are, why do it at the busiest times, when you’ll be taking attention away from full paying customers? Surely you want these couple branding people to come in on a Tuesday afternoon when it’s quieter?
One guess as to why is they’re not very busy ever, so by having people there during their peak times they’ll make the place seem busy.

Another peculiarity is that you need to make a reservation. Now, I’ve never been to a Canadian Brew House, but as I understand, they’re kind of like Boston Pizza, so reservations seem a little weird. The logical reason is so they can make sure they have tonnes of 7oz steaks kicking around. Or, maybe they’ll be restricting the number of these deals that can come at one time. Perhaps if you call them next week after buying the deal and try and book they’ll tell you that you can’t get a spot for a few weeks…

Say they restrict it to 2 groups of 10 per night (3 per week) per location (3), it’ll take 6 weeks before they can serve everyone. It’s possible.

Anyway, the deal is pretty good and I’d say worthy of being a launch deal for them. They certainly put a lot of effort into marketing the deal, with radio ads for the last few days talking about how good of a deal it is, which is something I’ve never seen any of the other group buying services do.

About Flash Deals

Flash Deals seems to be a little bit unique in that they’re Edmonton based and only (for now anyway) serve Edmonton. A little bit of digging reveals they’re a product of Eight Leaves Media, a local marketing firm. In their own words…

Eight Leaves Media is an Edmonton based customer analytics firm. We develop data-driven marketing solutions to help your organization acquire, develop, and retain profitable, long-term customer relationships.

Seems that they’ve noticed the group-buying thing going on (who hasn’t?) and jumped on the bandwagon. They’ve obviously decided that to stand out they have to spend some money on marketing, instead of just letting word of mouth like most of the other guys. Living Social is perhaps the only other one that I’ve seen actually advertising, with tons of Google Banner ads, but never offline.

The group-buying thing has become so big that you can even buy pre-made group-buying websites and marketing packages from the kind of people that advertise in franchise magazines. For example, I came across Daily Deals Etc who, for a $49/month service fee, will give you a daily deals type website all ready to go, just add deals and subscribers! They’ll take care of the website, payments, support, etc. Talk about lowering the barrier to entry!

Good luck to Flash Deals, and good luck to The Canadian Brew House when it comes to preparing those 10,000 steak dinners they just sold!

I’m going to be writing a post shortly about all of the group buying companies currently serving Edmonton, including they’re offerings for businesses, which are all quite different!

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