Apr 18, 2007
Coke is working with new marketing company Crayon to launch a competition in Second Life, the name of the project is VirtualThirst and involves the general public and residents of Second Life designing Coke vending machines that deliver “experiences”. As it turns out you can submit ideas as written descriptions, images, videos, or of course jump in world and design “drop” your design off at their location in SL. I’m pretty sure that this will do better than their video competition megaflop “the coke show”, to start with they have gone to a place where people are creating stuff already, and are trying to connect with “creatives” there. I’m not sure this passes my “who cares” test, but I guess that will depend on the output of participants. In many ways “design a new coke vending machine that vends experiences” smacks of something that sounds great to marketers, and a huh? from the general populous… maybe.
"imagine a world in which a simple vending machine could dispense - not Coca-Cola - but the ESSENCE of Coca-Cola: refreshment, joy, unity, experience"
Seriously? who talks like that and who believes that the essence of coke is refreshment, joy, unity, experience; apart from the vp of marketing.
Anyway, what have they done right:
- They’ve gone to where people are creating
- They’ve involved the community in the judgeing
- They are going to let people use the winning in Second Life for free in their homes etc
- the publicity they get from just doing something in Second Life will be an additional return on investment
They also have a myspace page, delicious page, flickr page, and a youtube page
Other coverage:
Jul 8, 2006
The obligitory “sign up form” is probably one of the most overlooked opportunities in the entire customer experience lifecycle, the red headed step child of touchpoints if you will.
Why? Because it’s probably one of the first points at which the customer is going to “experience” your company, and the experience is generally at best blah and at worst hostile.
Take for instance what you need to fill in if you want to comment, thats right comment on Bob Garfield’s new “open source” Listenomics (which is of course open source because you can comment on it, right?)
Now a sign up form is not only a chance to make a first impression, it’s a negotiation, you have something I might want, and I have some information you might want. As it is a negotiation the value of what you’re offering has to be weighed against the value of my information and the effort that i’m going to put into filling in this form. The problem here, is ad-age uses the same sign up form for everything, and filling in that form might be a valid proposition in some cases. Unfortunately for Bob, the ability to comment on his blog is not enough enticement for me to fill in that form.
Now, the reason I was even inspired to write this post was because I was filling in the cork’d sign up form and it had me laughing out loud, yes it was funny, not only that it set the whole tone for me with regard to the cork’d brand. The experience was such that I “loved” the brand even before i’d finished filling in the sign up form, yes, loved. If a company has a good enough sense of humor to make me laugh during the sign up process then it sure has made a connection with me.
More to the point, why don’t more companies and brands demonstrate a sense of humor?
Anyway, I think that the problems with many sign up forms are exactly the reason that wufoo.com was created.
