Give something for free and become remarkable
by Andrew on 24/04/08 at 10:02 pm
3 comments
When was the last time you took the family for a fun Saturday morning at the local plumbing supplier? How about the lawn-mower repair shop? Never? What a shame.
My family was up in Natal visiting the grandparents this month and we made 3 trips to a garden nursery that was a 20 minute drive away. “Celtiskloof”, just outside of Howick in the Natal Midlands, decided to turn their fairly ordinary Garden Pavilion franchise nursery into something remarkable, by making it fun to go there. They have installed a massive jungle-gym area with slides, trampolines, cargo nets and even a ride-on train. They also have a 9 hole putt-putt course and a more than adequate resturant/coffee shop. Just about everything is free to use, even if you don’t buy any plants.
Here is my son sitting in the play area with the resturant in the background. He’s eating a snack brought from home, but they’re not too stressed about that either:
There are dozens of nurseries in the area, and most of them are closer to town and more accessible. The owners of Celtiskloof probably faced the decision to spend hundreds of thousands blasting the public with advertising in order to draw them up the hill to a place that sells plants, just like all the other plant places. Instead they decided to use that money to build a huge play area that has got every mom in a 50km radius talking about it. It doesn’t cost anything to let a kid use a slide, and I’ll bet a fair number of moms have started picking up a pack of seedlings on the way out.
Garden Centres seem to have cottoned on to this idea a while ago – I can think of a couple of others in Cape Town that also have facilities like this – but I can’t think of any hardware stores in my area with a putt-putt course. Or any swimming pool shops.
It doesn’t have to be a playground, but I’m sure whatever your line of business you could divert your advertising budget into providing something free that will get people talking about you (like this and this). In other words, becoming remark-able.
Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew.
Darren
Apr 25th, 2008
Excellent example of contributing to the community and benefiting by accident, as it were [even if there is some intention to it].
It’s challenging to think that companies could be passing by so many great opportunities like this every day that could seperate them [us] from the crowd.
Great post.
Marcel
Apr 25th, 2008
This “give something for free” concept is now getting more & more accepted as an incredible way to increase your leads!
If you want to know more & find out how your company can benefit, I highly recommend the book “Gravitational Marketing”
http://www.gravitationalmarketing.com
The book is available from Kalahari.net here : http://shrunklink.com/apoc
It’s all about the ‘free’!
Chris M
Apr 26th, 2008
Interesting point, I’ve never really taken notice to something like this. I do not have kids, which I guess holds me back from thinking of these things, but it’s a really great view point.
That’s for a good read.