Coke Blak Blitz
Street teams were on many corners of downtown Chicago today–handing out FREE 8oz bottles (glass) of Coke Blak. How much will this tactic do for the product? I liked the taste–I’d rather have less sugar in it. If it did, I might start to drink this on some afternoons rather than coffee (though I’ll still have my morning joe). So, if the product is appealing, will free samples be a better method to generate adoption than mass advertising or couponing?
Let’s say the cost, including labor and product, of the street team event came out to $2.00 per sample and they handed out 10,000 bottles during a two hour period during the lunch hour in Chicago. Of course, you have the 10,000 people that tried the product. Let’s say 2,000 of them liked it enough to buy. So you invested $20,000 for 2,000 adopters. A decent investment on it’s own. Then you get the network effect of me telling others. I brought the bottle back to my office–and it started a conversation on the elevator among 6 people. So it generated buzz, on the first order of 1 to 6. So in the case of positive interactions, the buzz effect was 12,000 people. There were also indirect effects. My coworkers and I saw at least 10 people walking around with the bottles in the preceding minute before we saw them being handed out. Coke Blak was everywhere during the lunch timeframe. Say that’s another 20 impressions for each bottle handed out–that’s 200,000 impressions in addition to actual product sampling.
A wise investment? Who knows? How many people are blogging about it? 1,912 “coke blak” posts on Technorati. My take? I think it’s a good move on Coke’s part. And as LP says, this should spur Pepsi on to bring Kona back.