Promote Your Business: Give It Away and Gain Millions, Just Like Disney.

Disney has found a way to link great marketing with great deeds. Their “What Will You Celebrate” campaign offers a free ticket to anyone over 6 years old who volunteers one day of service during 2010. And, yes, an entire family can qualify if each volunteers a day. They hope to have million volunteers.

The simplest ideas are often the most brilliant, and this one borders on genius for three reasons:

1. It’s a wonderful way to reward good deeds and make a profit. Disney certainly looks philanthropic and generous, and indeed they should be applauded for greatly multiplying the effect and impact of their corporate giving.

2. It’s destine to be a money-maker for Disney. A free pass is surely enough of a savings to get many Moms and Dads thinking about a Disney vacation—and they are probably Moms and Dads who thought a Disney vacation was out of reach. After all, are the Moms and Dads who can easily afford a Disney vacation likely to volunteer for free passes? Possibly yes, but probably no.

Yet, a free one-day pass seems a very low cost to Disney World or Disneyland, since Disney will still make money on hotel, food, souvenirs, etc. as well as the extra days the family stays (who goes to Disney for just one day??) . Looks like Disney’s found the fulcrum for discounting their product to an untapped market segment while simultaneously increasing profits.

3. It’s a marketing goldmine even if Volunteers don’t take advantage of the free passes. How? Disney gets the name and address of a million people interested in visiting their parks. What a great pipeline to work!

So let’s break this campaign down. If you wanted to recreate this marketing campaign for your business, you would need to:

1. Identify a new market niche to pursue,
2. Know your costs,
3. Divide your product into pieces that, once a customer buys one piece they stay or come back for the next piece and the next and the next, etc., and
4. Determine how much you can afford to give away but still entice the customer,
5. Then, define a “freebie” that appeals to the customers in the new market niche (but not necessarily to your existing customer since you don’t want to cannibalize your existing market), and
6. Create a “win-win” scenario, where customer is rewarded for doing something good or something they were going to do anyway. (You really need to understand the customer’s persona to do this.)

Disney recognized that they could gain more customers from the next tier of customers (based on income) by offering a discount. No genius there. But linking that discount to Volunteering--that is the stroke of genius.

Would this work for your business? Rest assured this scenario won’t work for everyone, but if your business can use it, you have a shot at some remarkable results. If not, then you need another marketing approach and it’s back to the drawing board!

Have you seen other campaigns that use this type of marketing scenario to bring in new customers?

--Paige Miller

www.multiplanetmarketing.com

Always thinking