Opportunistic marketing / pr: two recent examples

Mar 08, 2010

Every cloud has a silver lining and in the last few weeks I’ve seen the silver lining of the GEC with stories of people pursuing shiny new beginnings and opportunities after being affected last year.  If you’re a positive and creative thinker you can see silver linings everywhere – not just in your dark cloud but in the dark clouds of others too – and this week a couple of great examples came to light.

Grill’d v Nandos

Burger chain Grill’d recently published a 2-for-1 burger offer in the Uni Times publication meant to be exclusively for Uni Times readers, however this was not in the T&Cs.  Electronic versions of the offer did the email rounds and Grill’d were inundated with people trying to redeem. Grill’d wouldn’t redeem electronic vouchers which upset many customers and lead them to clarify the situation on their blog. Seeing the opportunity, Nandos released a statement titled ‘we don’t care where your vouchers come from just come on in’ and capatalised on the situation by redeeming any Grill’ed vouchers – printed or otherwise. Read more about it in Mumbrella or on Nando’s blog.  Props to poor Grill’d who openly admitted the situation was a ‘complete debacle’ on their blog. On the up side there’s now of bunch of people who have a new awareness of the brand.

City of Pocket v City of Sydney

The owners of Pocket Bar on Burton Street in Sydney have seen an opportunity to ease the pain of getting fined. The Pocket Optimism Act works like this: when you recieve a parking fine, a toll notice or any other stupid fine take it to Pocket Bar within a week of getting it and they’ll give you 20 per cent off your total bill.  Pocket Bar says ‘with Pocket Optimism we are bringing the fun back into living; breathing life into little annoying things.’ Great idea, a nice kicker for customers and a great incentive to drop in.

So there’s an opportunity that came from competitors and one that came from customers above.  What are the dark clouds of your brand’s competitors or customers and how can you be the silver lining?

Posted by Renee Creer

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 8:22 am. It is filed under Case Study, Ideas, Publicity and tagged with Consumer Promotions, Grill'd, Mumbrella, Nando's, Opportunistic Marketing, Pocket Bar, public relations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.