The 6000 Project – A Sparkling Marketing Idea
My friend Reka, who lives north of Venice, Italy, had a Prosecco problem. 6000 bottles without a home.
She and her husband Pier, who own Sfriso Winery, had a 6,000 bottle order of Prosecco canceled just as Italy started to shut down in February.
With Covid challenging an industry built on relationship marketing, Reka couldn’t travel to meet with new customers. And, even if she could, many of her customers just were in a buying mood.
No tourism, wine tasting, or wine buying. Restaurants weren’t open. Makes you want a glass of wine, right?
So Reka thought – Okay, now what?
Reka is a sharp wine marketing professionals who has worked in agencies and within the wine industry too. Through March and April, she kept marketing direct to her consumers using video and email marketing. She knew she had to stay in front of sympathetic customers.
But what could she do with these 6000 bottles of lovely Prosecco?
She thought about the challenge and said, maybe we could create a little competition to get some creative minds to help brand these bottles. She created a unique website and Shopify store to promote the concept she called The 6000 Project
Create the label. Reap the rewards.
6000 bottles of as-yet unlabeled Prosecco, Italy’s most popular sparkling wine. A Covid-canceled order. In this design competition for creatives, the winning label will grace Sfriso’s Winery’s 2020 release. The more they sell, the more the winning designer and 2nd and 3rd runners-up are financially compensated.
Who gets to decide the winners? The public, with their votes on this website.
It’s win-win wine!
Wine Twitterverse to the Rescue
Just a few days ago, Reka promoted the creative challenge. The wine twitter-verse started sharing her promotional concept.
Then, from one of those tweets, she was connected to a UK company/community called The One Minute Brief, who picked up on the idea. They wanted to join the party.
Who is the One Minute Brief?
It is part of an advertising agency called The Bank of Creativity. They created this community of designers to do this: We promote brands & causes via social media by challenging our creative community on Twitter to respond with intuitive ideas to daily advertising briefs & reward the best entries.
All submissions are retweeted to their 23,000+ followers, which generates millions in potential reach every single day, enabling brands to interact with considerable audiences in an engaging, cost-effective way while creating quality content.
OMB serves as an accessible, diverse & inclusive social network for the creative industry across the world, and they host regular workshops, talks & events for our followers, otherwise known as the OMBLES.
You may know One Minute Brief from the Guinness ad created on spec, and then Guinness snapped it up from the designer. A Pub called Staying In used OMB platform and Irish freelance copywriter Luke O’Reilly came up with the couch ad, and Guinness bought it.
Pop Goes Prosecco
In a few days, Reka received more than 340 Prosecco label designs. She has presold about 12% of her inventory in a few days with two months to go.
Sfriso can ship to 34 states in the US. Vineyard to your door. And, the more people buy, the more cost-effective it is so perhaps find a group of friends to buy together. Purchase details here.
You can see the designs on OMB’s Facebook page here. (please vote!) The OMB part of the campaign is closed as of today.
You can submit designs until July 19, 2020, and the voting begins around the end of July.
Marketing Lessons Bubbling Up
- Stay in Touch: How can you stay in direct contact with customers. Whether it is with email, phone calls, letters, or videos – you need to be in touch with customers regularly. The trick is – be helpful, don’t annoy them. Share stuff they care about.
- Gamify Your Business Challenge: Reka thought about connecting with a creative community to create fun label design? And, she realized that every creative designer who submits a label would promote the label to their friends and family. Like igniting a micro-influencer community. And, she is getting orders from new customers who are friends of this new community of designers.
- Tone Matters: The tone of the promotional was pitch-perfect. As we are coming out of the pandemic, thinking about joy and celebration feels good. And what better way to celebrate life than with Prosecco? By 8/16, she’ll close the presale of bottles. The wine gets shipped in time for the end of the year holidays and festivities. It is as if this promotion was brought to by JOY. And every touchpoint of her marketing is a celebration.
Marketing is hard work, especially when you have a challenge like a big canceled order. But Reka used her stay-at-home time to think. And explore. And wonder.
Eventually, a fantastic idea bubbles up.
Need help to create a clever promotion?
I can help. You can set up a time chat with me about your marketing challenges using my calendar. Our initial conversation is free. You talk, I listen. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com or call me. 919 720 0995. Visit my website at www.themarketingsage.com Let’s explore working together today.
Photos courtesy of Sfriso Winery and One Minute Brief
