Kwik-E-Mart and 7-Eleven: Buzz Marketing at its Best — You Can Do it Too!

Tuesday, August 21, 2007 at 07:52pm by David Askaripour in Marketing

In July a dozen or so 7-Eleven shops were transformed into Kwik-E-Marts to generate buzz for the new Simpsons Movie. Each store, literally, was changed around to look just like the store on the hit television series.

This sort of marketing is definitely thinking outside of the box — the sort that really gets people engaged. People, when shopping at their typical 7-Eleven store actually feel a part of the movie, a part of the Simpsons show.

Providing that sort of internal value for customers is priceless. It’s not only good for 7-Eleven sales, but, of course, for ticket sales.

From Nytimes.com

A spokesman for Fox Broadcasting, Gregg Brilliant, said the promotion had surpassed expectations: “Anytime you make something that appeals directly to a fan base, in a limited quantity, for a limited amount of time, naturally you are going to have a collectible value.”

Since the mock Kwik-E-Marts would only be around for a limited time, the value of the experience was increased exponentially. In marketing, this is sometimes referred to “scarcity marketing.”

From 101publicrelations.com:

This tactic Scarcity Marketing is used to tell people that:

• They can only have a certain number of an item
• There’s only a limited supply available
• Something’s only available at that price for a limited time

Try and think on this sort of marketing level with your own business. What scheme can you pull off — maybe with just your business or by collaborating with other businesses in a coordinated effort — to spark a ton of buzz about your product or service? And, if possible, to use scarcity tactics to increase the value of the marketing campaign.

Who knows, maybe it’ll be a stunt, practicable joke, or an outright way to “punk” your clients one day. Something to produce some sort of unordinary and out-of-the-blue emotions from your clients.

Some ideas may include:

• Offering a new product or service that you are capable of providing but never did since it was out of your niche. Just offer it for a month (and make it cheap)
• Totally redesigning your site with a funky CSS style sheet that you can turn on for a day or two
• Going to the park with 1000 balloons with your URL printed on them and handing them out to people
• Create a video of you and all of your employees making a mock music video of your favorite band and playing the video on your homepage
• Offering a 25% discount on all of your services for an entire month
• Creating a fun contest to stir up buzz about a new project… but instead of giving the prize to the winner, give it to everyone that participated!

As Apu, owner of Kwik-E-Mart, would say: “Thanks you, come again.” But come back to Mind Petals — or maybe we should design Mind Petals as an online Kwik-E-Mindpetals.

2 Comments

Leave a Comment