The Story

Being one of the biggest fans of the critically acclaimed movie, “Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory” (the original with Gene Wilder of course), I was immediately drawn to a recent blog post on innonate.com about using a Golden Ticket marketing tactic for product promotion and personal brand building. The man behind this non-traditional marketing scheme is Gary Vaynerchuk, host of Wine Library TV, a daily internet webcast on the subject of wine, and author of 101 Wines: Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World.

In this particular example of “Golden Ticket” marketing, Gary goes into a Border’s bookstore, finds his book and leaves a surprise message for the buyer of his book, which is his personal email address and a secret code to redeem a prize. I thought this was a great way to measure ROI on a non-traditional marketing tactic. Not only does this prove Gary’s personal branding story, but it also directly engages his audience and furthermore, entices them with mystery as an incentive to contact him to redeem their “prize.” (And, let’s not forget that he leaves a hand-written message)

Measuring ROI on non-traditional marketing can be tricky and sometimes nearly impossible, so when I read about Gary Vaynerchuk’s style of guerrilla marketing, I was inspired to create more innovative measuring tools!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 8:48 am and is filed under Branding, Corporate branding, Guerrilla Marketing, Viral Marketing, Word of mouth marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.