Last October I flew to beautiful London for a relax/work trip. I was to attend Distilled’s SearchLove conference, as well as getting lost as you always should around London. BTW, just go take part to SearchLove, if you never did, and thank me later.
Anyways, it was a great chance to visit a part of the world which is years ahead digital-wise, and the most impressive thing for a marketer from an underdeveloped country is how competitive the market is. In Italy, most SMEs do not even have a website, let alone online strategies; I’m talking of a country which BASES its economy on SMEs.
Since I am a huuuge consumer of spicy food, I always force my wife to follow me to all the Mexican restaurants I can find, which in that case was the well-known Wahaca (the Covent garden one). I remember a friendly, messy place with a friendly, crazy Brazilian waiter who made our dinner special. Along with the bill, he handed us a small complimentary object. You can see it in the background of my pic: it’s a matchbox-shaped, eco-friendly spicy-pepper seeds holder, which they suggest to plant anywhere you want. I immediately fell in LOVE with it, kept it through the winter in my key tray, planted the seeds a few weeks ago, and watered them every other day since. The green little guys you see in the pic are only two of a dozen sprouts I have now 🙂
Too much effort amirite!? That is, if you – like myself – are not really green-fingered. But they do not catch your attention with gardening do they. They do it with hot peppers! And that, I can waste some of my time on. That, I like. Incidentally, it is also tangent to what they SELL: they are not merely selling food, they sell the IDEA of spicy food, which is the right key to my attention. So, no gardening, no food: an idea, rather.
Guess who will remember the brand, when in the UK? This guy.
So now a spaghetti-eater living 1,000 miles away from London has the Wahaca logo in his balcony, and his mind. And spaghetti-eaters do not dig non-Italian food do we. That’s some well-played marketing, indeed.
Inception of ideas, that’s what we do.
Also, to the benefit of my SEO fellows: they earned an organic link from this blogpost, which is pure gold for their website even if my blog is not the best source ever. Talk about link earning! Little effort, big gain.
Soundtrack: Inmazes by VOLA
