Starbucks Sees Marketing Blunder, Caribou Coffee Sees Marketing Opportunity

When Starbucks sent out a promotional email offering a free cup of coffee to a small group of employees and asked them to send it to their family and friends, they did not expect it to spread across the nation. But, that is exactly what it did. Starbucks then canceled the promotion, saying that the offer had been modified beyond its original intent. This was an undoubtedly bad move. Starbucks now comes across as a greedy corporation who is only concerned with the bottom-line. They also leave the impression that they do not honor their word.

Now, Caribou Coffee is willing to pick up Starbucks’ slack – literally. The company says it will honor the void Starbucks coupons. If customers bring the coupon to a Caribou store they will receive a free medium cold press iced coffee, iced americano or iced tea. On top of that, Caribou Coffee is also offering free drinks to all its email subscribers. Way to go Caribou Coffee!

For Starbucks, this incident serves as a lesson of how backing out on an offer can damage your reputation and can leave the door open to competitors!

Caribou Coffee’s marketing strategy in this incident is simply amazing! They responded quickly with a very generous offer. Doing so has greatly increased the company’s media exposure and improved its image!

Tags: PR, Public Relations, Marketing, Communications

Marketing Strategy: Naymz.com

There are many times that I imagine myself in a VP of Marketing position for a company and how I would help grow the business. Occasionally, I like to write a post about it. This is one of those times.

Website: Naymz.com

Service Description: Naymz gives you the ability to control what people (potential employers, friends, etc.) find about you in all of the major search engines.

This service is screaming to be marketed to career-minded professionals looking to climb the corporate ladder! Here is how I would do just that.

Website Marketing:
Aside from the standard act of creating a easy-to-navigate website, which they have, Naymz could use a flash demo to give the service and website life. Most of the information anyone could want about the service is on the site, it just needs to be consolidated. A flash demo would do that nicely. To take it even a step further, there should be four flash demos. Each demo would focus on positive and real world uses of the service for different professionals/industries. For example, Naymz could have a flash demo for business professionals, real estate agents, doctors, and one for personal use.

Advertising:
The idea is to pique the interest of people who are concerned about their reputation, at a time when their reputation is their foremost thought. What better time than when people are looking for a new job? The obvious place to start advertising Naymz would be on employments sites such as Monster and CareerBuilder. A secondary area to target would be websites of personal branding coaches such as William Arruda’s ReachCC.com. LinkedIn.com, an online community full of professionals concerned about their reputation, is another prime advertising space.

Naymz might also consider sponsoring/publishing whitepapers on personal brand management. Naymz should also pitch its service to authors of personal brand management books in the hopes of getting mentioned in their next book. The number of books on personal brand management is increasing and with the present social networking craze and the looming Web 2.0, I can only imagine that area of authorship continuing to increase.

There you have it, my quick marketing plan for Naymz.com. This plan is by no means complete but I do believe it serves as a good stepping-stone!

Tags: PR, Public Relations, Marketing, Communications

Podcasting Can Get You New Clients

A great post is sitting and waiting for you over on the MarketingProfs: Daily Fix blog.

The post, written by John Jantsch, illustrates a novel way to use podcasts to meet potential clients…

Create a podcast and you have the perfect door opening tool. Now, instead of calling that big shot business leader or influential referral source you would love to know and begging them to let you come over and sell them, simply request an interview for your podcast show.

Bingo. People can’t resist interview requests. No matter how small the audience. Reach out to authors, celebrities, industry gurus, influencers, it doesn’t really matter… they will respond often to your request for an interview. (If they employ a PR firm it’s even easier, because most PR folks just want interviews, any interviews.)

You know that getting the introduction is the hardest part. Now you’ve got the perfect tool.

I can definitely see this type of approach working in many industries!

Tags: PR, Public Relations, Marketing, Communications