Reach Across The Aisle

I once counseled a company to partner with their largest competitor for a major promotion. After they restarted the CEO’s heart, I had to calmly explain the concept of “all ships rise” and help him understand that he simply couldn’t go it alone. He didn’t have the marketing budget to reach enough of the right audience. His only hope was to join forces with his competitor, launch an “industry” campaign and then rely on the fact that his product was superior to ensure a favorable share of any new sales. In other words, sell soup not your soup.

Just like in politics, sometimes the greater good outweighs partisanship. At the end of the day, more sales for you is good, even if it involves generating a few new sales for your biggest competitor.

So if you're looking around wondering how you're going to survive this wonderful economy, take a moment and think about how you could partner with your competitors. Now this works best for companies that have geographic strongholds, the pizza joint in my neighborhood for instance. They can't afford a "go eat pizza" multi-media campaign but what if all the pizza joints in New Orleans teamed up? While I might travel across town to visit one of the others, chances are I'm going to default to my local favorite down the street.

But don't just stop with partnering. Add layers to the call to action. I like pizza. I like it even more if you're going to donate money to my kids' school or my favorite charity or to create a "rainy day" fund to help people that get downsized.

Ask yourself how you can extend the campaign. A mass media campaign is great, but what about something like good old fashioned door hangers. You could mass print (most of the cost of printing anything is setting up the press -- paper and ink are cheap) generic "eat pizza" hangers and then stickers for each local pizza joint. This would allow each joint to burst market to its core geographic zone based on each joints unique customer usage pattern.

Then figure out how to lay in a bit of digital or social media. Could these pizza joints do something with Yelp? Could they somehow reach out to the Elite Yelpers and get a buzz campaign going? Could the pizza joints all "start a wave" on Facebook? How about a Twitter campaign? Think of the power of hundreds of Tweeters all tweeting about your "rainy day fund" campaign. Could you must enough votes on Digg or Reddit to get your "press release" on the first page? Would a local band or two cut a special "pizza rainy day fund" music video that you could put on you tube and seed with your loyal customers wh are on Facebook and MySpace? Can you cost effectively use Google? What if your campaign contained a keyword, the name of the "rainy day fund" for instance. Given that you're the only folks using this word, would that make it cheaper to "bid" on that word using Adwords? My local joint can't afford to buy "pizza" but they could afford "pizza fund" if no one else was bidding on it. Yes, people do see tv/print ads and then search keywords like campaign titles.

I'm sure you can think of far more creative offers than I can. Or maybe examples of where you've seen this work in the real world. Or better examples of cooperative versus singular elements of this campaign. Let me know. Tell me what I have neglected to mention. Talk back.

photo credit:  Brick_Alchemist