Return on Intention

This week, Al Gore’s movie about global warming (An Inconvenient Truth) hit DVD. Along with the movie was one of the best promotions I have seen in a long time. There are two options for buying the dvd, one with just the dvd and one packaged with a flouresent low energy light bulb for $5.00 more. This was a home run! While light bulbs don’t have much to do with movies, a low energy light bulb has everything to do with the content of this movie.This bundle is a win for everyone. The light bulb manufacturer (Phillips) wins buy being able to put their brand in front of the customer in a way that doesn’t seem like advertising or marketing. Its a win for the movie because the point was to get people involved enough to take action, and this light bulb is a way to do it, not to mention the “you’ll never guess what I saw” factor.The retailer and the bulb manufacturing company also win because after watching the movie you will probably be convinced to go buy more of the light bulbs.This is the kind of promotion that works, the products may not seem to be relevant to each other, but the content of each is. The customer isn’t going to look at this and say “Why would a light bulb be packaged with a movie” because to the customer, this isn’t a movie, its a peice of content. That content has a value above and beyond what the product physically is. This point is important for companies when they make decisions, especially marketing ones. Never forget what your customers get out of your product.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 12:31 am and is filed under Doin' it right, Mar Comm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.