Thank God It’s… CHRISTMAS! Find out how this brand fulfilled its customers’ ultimate Christmas wish!
While we wait for the actual Christmas Day celebrations, allow me to share with you another guerrilla marketing highlight that will help us further feel the spirit of the season. Check out our newsletter feature for today! Read on to know how this restaurant chain spread the holiday cheers in the UK and virtually transported customers to their ultimate Christmas wish.
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Thank God It’s… CHRISTMAS! Find out how this brand fulfilled its customers’ ultimate Christmas wish! What activity would you like to do most during Christmas? Building a giant snowman? Opening Christmas presents? Bonding with your family over a hot cup of coffee or your favorite drink? We all have our preferences in doing activities we love during Christmas. … and for restaurant chain TGI Fridays, the Yuletide season in 2015 meant enabling customers to experience doing what they love to do most in this season. What was that? Dog sledding!
To make customers’ Christmas wishes come true, TGI Fridays prepared a VR (virtual reality) sled ride pulled by 10 Huskies around the snow-capped Lapland Province in Finland. The 90-second experience was devised by the restaurant chain following its market research that showed dog sledding is the ultimate Christmas activity that adults in the UK would like to try the most. Additionally, the research revealed that the Lapland Province is a dream Christmas location and a “White Christmas” is a festive wish for 43% of respondents. Going back to TGI Fridays’ VR sled ride… The Oculus VR headsets filled users’ entire field of vision and tracked head movements with a gyroscope, orientation sensor, and accelerometer. These features tricked the brain into feeling as though the user physically and literally entered a new world!
To provide an almost real-life experience for customers, the restaurant chain’s campaign team filmed the whole VR content in the town of Kiruna. This is located 85 miles north of the Arctic Circle in the Lapland Province. The campaign piloted at TGI Fridays’ Westfield Stratford location and visited select branches across the UK throughout the month of December 2015. The restaurant chain worked with Projection Artworks, which is now known as Pixel Artworks, to create the VR campaign. Of course, the whole experience wouldn’t be complete without matching good food from TGI Fridays. So, to make customers’ Christmas guerrilla marketing experience memorable and complete, the restaurant chain made sure it offered Christmas menus on the table! TGI Fridays also ensured its branches are well-designed based on the festivity. Indeed, this one’s a hearty Christmas ride! According to TGI Fridays UK’s marketing manager, Rachel McDowell, “We always pull out all the stops for Christmas at Fridays, like our UK-first mistletoe drone last year. We thought long and hard about how to top that this year for guests as part of our Jingle Effect campaign and we couldn’t think of a better way of doing that than making people’s Christmas dreams come true virtually at Fridays.” She also added, “The experience, powered by cutting-edge Oculus technology, is truly incredible, giving guests 100% freedom to explore the stunning, magical snowscape―and they can even enjoy our new Christmas menu as they do it.” TGI Fridays’ campaign showed us that proper use of technologies and resources can do BIG wonders in promoting your brand. What’s more? The guerrilla marketing campaign is the first-ever VR experience done by a restaurant chain in the UK… and the fact that it’s the FIRST makes it advantageous for TGI Fridays. Why? Being the first to do that particular campaign enabled TGI Fridays to leverage its position in the food industry and reach more customers through a never-been-done-before marketing tactic. This also showed the restaurant chain’s ability to combine its creativity, available technology, and other resources to create an awesome campaign. As a business owner or marketer, what can you take away from this campaign? Social interaction is an important part of guerrilla marketing. Without this aspect, consumers won’t find your campaigns as engaging and enjoyable as they should be. Additionally, be creative in planning your guerrilla marketing campaigns. Match your campaigns with a particular event, season, holiday, etc. This will not only make consumers interact with your brand but also enable them to enjoy the festivities. Hope you’ve found this week’s guerrilla marketing insight interesting and helpful. Follow us on LinkedIn. Stay tuned for tomorrow's 12 Days of Christmas article! Do you want to learn about how the RED cups became something a lot of people look forward to every Christmas? See it on next 12 Days of Christmas article! |
