Marketing Home Runs

OK so you may not know too much about baseball, and I must admit that before I moved to St. Louis, neither did I. My family and I moved to St. Louis Missouri in 2005 and unbeknownst to me, St. Louis is a big baseball town. It is the home of the St. Louis Cardinals. It also used to be the home of the Cardinals football team as well, but we won’t talk about that. It’s still a bone of contention many years after they moved and became the Arizona Cardinals.

Lo and behold, not a year after we were transplanting ourselves into St Louis, the Cardinals baseball team won the World Series of baseball. Now I also don’t want to get into this, as I know that not the whole world played. That’s a conversation for another time.

 Anyway, for those who are unaware of the scoring system in baseball, you get runs on the board by crossing all four bases. Sometimes you may get a hit and will only take you to the first or second base. You don’t actually get your run until you cross homebase, or home plate. That being said, a home run is where you hit a ball straight off the bat and it is that good, that you get to run all four bases at the same time and get an immediate score. I guess like hitting a four or a six in cricket.

 I only bring that up because sometimes the term “home run” is thrown out willy-nilly and we don’t really understand the background behind a home run. The home run has an immediate return on investment. There is no waiting around on bases for someone else to hit or run for you to progress. It is all you. One shot.

 So, when we talk about marketing home runs, we’re not talking about something that you do on and off month after month or season after season. A home run is something that you can put a lot of time and effort into leading up to the event, but the return on the investment comes back almost instantaneously. This isn’t a calculation of how many runs you get per your career. This is an instant hit straight off the bat.

 You may have had some of these marketing home runs, the promotions or marketing events that have instantly been excepted and responded to, and you have seen the results almost immediately. It doesn’t mean to say that these activities cannot have a lingering affect over time, but you do see the effects as soon as you launch the program or promotion.

 Let me share with you probably the best marketing home run that we ever hit in our retail stores. Now that’s not to say that we didn’t have other great marketing ideas. These other ideas, however, were more of a slow burn, or a “one off” that didn’t really pull a whole lot of revenue or recognition into the business.

 Our marketing home run was a “Kids Designer Sundae”. We had a whole bunch of cards printed where someone under the age of 10 could fill out a form with their name, their email, their phone number (parents approved) And space for a description of what would be the child’s best Sundae idea.

 We had them put them in a small entry box beside where the entry form was located, and each day we would go through and sort out the sheep from the goats. There were some great Sundae ideas in this little box of gold, but they were also terrible ones. So, what do we do with the good ones?

 Here’s where the magic happens.

 We would call up the entrant’s mom or dad have a conversation we go like this.

 “Hello Katie‘s dad, it’s Mr. C here from the local ice cream shop. We have selected your daughters entry form for our kids designer Sundae of the week.

 If you’d like to bring Katie down to the store at an agreed-upon time, we will make one for her and give it to her for free, and with your permission, and a release form, will take a photo of her holding it and we will promote it as the Sundae of the week.”

 We would also give the Sundae a unique name. If Katie had designed a sundae that had three scoops of chocolate, banana, and nuts with a chocolate topping, we may call it Katies Funky Monkey.

 Now who is my number one marketing agent for this week? Katie‘s mum and dad. They are using all of their social media prowess to promote their little girls fame and fortune in being the Sundae of the Week girl at the local ice cream shop.

 On top of this we got new ice cream flavor and sundae ideas, and tried many different combinations of different ingredients and toppings that we would never have thought of previously. Now is any great idea completely new? No not really.

 I remember as a kid playing in the Wilston districts under 13 cricket team, and after hitting 75 runs one morning out on a sultry Brisbane cricket pitch, was given a McDonald’s most valuable player award. It had a certificate, a coupon for a free cheeseburger, and also a card that you could take to your local McDonald’s and have your picture taken and put up on the wall. I remember that week I asked my parents to go to McDonald’s about 76 times.

 And that was before the days of social media or really anything electronic.

 The combination of having a customer contribute to the menu creates a deep-seated loyalty for your business and when you get that connection between you, your business, your menu, and your customer, you have an ambassador for life.

 Home runs don’t always happen. Sometimes you can go a whole game and not even see one. But every now and again you have an idea, or you may be influenced by another business who is trying something in their realm, or even take the suggestion of an employee, and once that promotion is put into place, it ends up being one of those that you can put down in the record books