Ideate

SA online retailer holds Woolworths to ransom

by Fred Roed on 03/02/10 at 9:37 am
7 comments

I’m a huge fan of guerrilla marketing. As a business owner, I’m well aware of the limitations of marketing budgets and the ongoing quest to spot snappy marketing opportunities. And so, when I saw this from my colleagues over at Yuppiechef, I rubbed my hands in glee.

I’ve been tweeting about it like crazy, but I think this deserves a dedicated article – here’s the story: Recently, Woolworths launched a Valentine’s competition and advertised the wrong website address on posters nation wide. (Skande! For a digital dude like me, that’s like arriving naked to work.)

The eagle-eyed Yuppiechef team spotted the oversight on Sunday afternoon and quickly registered the already publicised address. On Monday morning a ransom note was posted on the Yuppiechef blog with the dastardly news that Yuppiechef had kidnapped their URL.

The note demanded that in return for having the web address pointed to their competition Woolies agree to match rand for rand each donation made to Soil for Life, a charity that Yuppiechef is supporting in 2010.

Paul Galatis who heads up marketing for Yuppiechef said, “This opportunity landed in our laps and we had to do something fun and positive. The online community loves it and has got right behind us. It’s a bit of a David & Goliath situation. We hope that Woolies doesn’t take it to heart, plays along and pays up. We’d hate to hurt the Lovebirds.”

One of South Africa’s leading marketing commentators, Jon Cherry, of Cherryflava said, “These kind of errors happen more regularly than one realizes, but it is seldom that a crowd like Yuppiechef take advantage of it do good.”

Loving it – this is the kind of entrepreneurial nous that puts a company on the map. Fortunately, Woolworths seems to have a sense of humour about the whole thing and have met Yuppiechef at their game.

Nice work Yuppies! Here’s hoping we see more of this from the Ideate community at large.

Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. Fred is the CEO of web marketing company World Wide Creative and the co-founder of online learning portal Heavy Chef. Fred loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. Follow Fred on Twitter here. View more articles by Fred Roed.

Tags: woolworths

Related Articles

• Four web PR mistakes that Woolworths could have avoided
• How To Build An Engaged Online Community
• Google Comes On Board For Online Retailing Conference Cape Town
• Online Reputation Management: What is it, and why should you care?
• Fred is famous…it’s all true!