In 1979 Ben & Jerry’s wanted to thank their customers, friends, family and supporters by handing out a free ice cream cone. This gradually became a tradition and nowadays it’s a huge marketing event that’s difficult to miss. How do they make this such a huge social media success? These little infographics show how they basically took over America’s social media for a day:
As you could see, they eventually reached over 700 million people worldwide, in one way or another. That’s 10% of the world’s population. Do you think these huge advertising campaigns will occur more often, or will people start getting tired of them?
Free is always good. I doubt people will get tired of this event unless they get tired of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. This event has turned out to be such a major success partially due to its smart use of social media (voting system) and being such a social event that people usually participate in groups, hence due to the nature of this marketing event it already encourages the sharing of it and inviting of friends to the event. I think Ben & Jerry’s has a advantage due to the industry that it operates in, if this event would be for car tires, post cards or hair products it would never reach such a huge audience due to these products not being consumed in a group. However i can see such events working for other similar products that are available in every large city, such as McDonalds offering free smoothies for a day or something similar.
I’ve seen this before and i think this is a good marketing strategy for a company like ben & jerry. Who doesn’t like ice cream? The fact that it is free people will never getting tired of this free campaign. It’s becoming more huge because it is also supported by social media frenzy. Everyone will talk about it on social media and others will also join to talk about it. But I wonder about retailing company (such as IKEA), will they ever do this kind of strategy as well or not.