To promote its new range of Special K crisps, Kellogg’s opened the world’s first tweet shop in London’s Soho area. The shop allows customers to sample each flavour of crisps before they were given the chance to buy a box for the cost of just one tweet. That’s right. No cash, just a single tweet.
Kellogg’s also had a number of recommended tweets for the up takers to share with the hashtags #TweetShop #spons. The #Spons was to be added to make sure that people knew that the messages were sponsored, thus appeasing the Advertising Standards Authority, although many ignored it.
The campaign was made very manageable through the hashtags, as this gave Kellogg’s the chance to document what people thought of the products as well as how many people were visiting.
Check out the promo video:
Has it been successful? Well, yes and no. There is plenty of talk about the Tweet Shop; however, the vast majority of it is across social media websites which shows that it was an interesting campaign. They did also get some coverage in the Daily Mail and The Guardian, although the latter’s piece wasn’t particularly flattering. After all, the main aim of the campaign will be to promote sales of their new product and to gain new customers. Given the location of most of their coverage I believe they will be disappointed by the conversion of triers to buyers.
Jill Insley from The Guardian says,
“There are now several firms which specialise in promoting products and services by paying Twitter users in return for positive mentions on the social network, and many companies are encouraging people to “like” them on Facebook by incentivising them with competitions and offers.
“Would this kind of marketing convince you to give up 140 characters for a freebie? Does it just make you doubt every tweeted recommendation you read?”
This raises an interesting point. A person recommending products on social media is the equivalent to word of mouth. Nowadays though it’s difficult to know who to believe as it’s hard to tell who genuinely recommends the products and who is getting rewarded for it. It may well be better to just ignore all recommendations on social media and simply judge things for yourself.
Jamillah Knowles from The Next Web thinks,
“The exercise certainly has been attracting attention and no doubt the event (which runs until Friday) is an interesting way to explore experiential marketing for companies that have the cash to create a pop-up to put it all in.
“We expect to see more variations on this theme. But the deal begs the question, what can you buy for a tweet? A packet of crisps is one thing, but we doubt De Beers will be copying this format any time soon.”
I must admit that I do like the idea of the pop-up Tweet Shop. It’s something a bit different and gets people talking online, but unfortunately about the campaign, not the product. Its lack of mainstream coverage has done little for the product and will probably end up turning very few people into regular paying customers. Could this idea be successful? Possibly. But right now Kellogg’s is probably wondering why they bothered.
