Creating a retail splash with Facebook courtesy of IKEA

Credit to the Forsman & Bodenfors agency in Sweden for coming up with this Facebook promotion for a new IKEA store. It’s almost a textbook example of using a social platform (Facebook), viral features and behaviors (photo tagging, link sharing, etc.), and a time-tested retail promotional trick (free product giveaways, “first-come, first-served! Hurry!”).

The only downside of this is I can’t see it having staying power – it’s a fantastic campaign to create a short-lived storm of attention and buzz, with a bit of media coverage after the fact, but once all the products are given away there doesn’t appear to be any hook for people to stay engaged.

But honestly, that’s a small downside, especially given the agency’s mandate was to promote the opening of a new retail store. Short-term buzz is perfect there, and again, this looks like an excellent social media campaign. The video case study below walks you through it.

Update: Mashable just wrote this up as well.

Community is great, just don’t start with a crap product

With so much focus these days on how companies can leverage great branding, marketing, and social media to build a passionate customer community, I think a pretty simple underlying truth tends to get overshadowed:

It all starts with a great product.

And not just a technically sound, decent quality, reasonably well designed product. But one that truly and deeply impresses. Three years ago on my personal blog I wrote this:

I don’t want their [customers'] reaction to be a measured, rational, dispassionate analysis of why the product is better than the alternatives, how the cost is more reasonable, feature set more complete, UI more AJAXified. I don’t want them to pause to analyze the boring feature comparison chart on the back of the box.

I want “f**king cool!” Period.

Look at all the chatter on Twitter from the WOMMA event in Vegas right now – the Marketing VP (Rob Bondurant) from Patagonia apparently just presented, and shared wonderful nuggets of wisdom along with a bunch of stories about how vibrant and passionate their community is.

If their products were just average, do you think Rob would have been on stage at WOMMA? No way. For all the cool stuff Patagonia has done to build their brand identity and encourage and cultivate their fans (and it’s seriously impressive), their success all starts with developing kick ass products that customers don’t just like, they adore.

So learn all you can about great marketing. Listen to smart people with great experiences to share. Sharpen your skills around supporting and fostering customer evangelists.

But be damn sure your product or service is awesome first. It all starts with that.

*Photo from the Patagonia home page, hoping they don’t mind the compliment.

Where Ivar’s thumbed a barnacle at transparency, and it worked

“He has been called the greatest self-promoter in the history of Seattle.” So said the Seattle Times this past September about Ivar Haglund, the founder of the Ivar’s seafood restaurant chain. The article goes on to describe the “discovery” of a barnacle encrusted billboard in the waters of Puget Sound out in front of downtown Seattle, supposedly put there in the 1950′s by a very forward looking Mr. Haglund.

He apparently foresaw the coming of a future of cross-Sound underwater ferries and a wonderful opportunity to promote his 75 cent cups of chowder. A local historian even chimed in, citing documents discovered in the company’s archives which supported the authenticity and hinted their might be more submerged billboards yet to be found.

A fantastic story, one which perfectly supported the Ivar brand, and garnered reams of local press coverage – and a 5-10% uptick in customer volume in the middle of a major recession.

Of course, it was all a hoax. A masterful joke played on the public, and the local media, by the crew at Ivar’s, the aforementioned local historian, and a local ad agency named Heckler Associates.

In this age of authenticity and transparency, was Ivar’s wrong in running with this oddball marketing campaign? After all, this wasn’t just some creative misdirection, or a hidden sponsor of some viral video. The company flat out lied, and even pulled in a credible historian to lie for them.

Shouldn’t they suffer some blowback or tarnish to their otherwise feel good reputation?

In this case, I’d have to say no. In an odd way, this blatant lie in support of a marketing campaign adds more to the Ivar’s brand – that of blatant, over-the-top, and creative ways to push some tasty clam chowder – than any wholly transparent social media or marketing effort I can think of.

The lie, in effect, makes them more authentic. Genius in its own way.

Photo via the linked Seattle Times article.