We just love this – it’s social commerce for consumer brands done right.
Kellogg’s has opened a ‘Tweet Shop’ to launch its latest Special K range of Cracker Crisps in Soho, London. Visit the store during this week’s social media week and pay-with-a-tweet for your sub 100 calorie pack of sea salt and balsamic vinegar, sweet chili or sour cream and onion flavors crisps. The Tweet Shop features a ‘tweet wall’ of shared tweets. It’s a smart way to get products into people’s hands and give them something to talk about – which is the ultimate secret to word of mouth, according to Emanuel Rosen, author of the best book on word of mouth.
And why do consumer brands want word of mouth? Because word of mouth accelerates launch sales. Combined with traditional advertising, word of mouth adds credibility to the communications mix. In other words, word of mouth makes advertising more effective. It’s what every new CPG brand needs when launching a new product line.
In the words of Kellogg’s Sarah Case
“The value of positive endorsements on social media sites is beyond compare so we’re excited to be the first company to literally use social currency instead of financial currency to launch this new product in our bespoke Special K shop… This is big news for Special K and we are hoping the brand’s move into crisps and the high street will create a major buzz on and offline.”
The Tweet Shop comes hot on the heels the brilliant Anthon Berg free-for-a-share pop-up store campaign, and the online free for a share book launch of Oh My God What Happened – and What Should I Do About it? – for digital marketers – that won a CyberLion award in Cannes.
We think you’ll be seeing a lot more of these ‘social sampling’ events in the future, because sampling and social fit together so well – the goal of sampling to drive word of mouth along with trial, and the commercial rationale for social media marketing is to unlock word of mouth value along with loyalty. Roll in pop-up retail – which has the explicit goal of creating buzz around a product launch and you have a turnkey solution to optimizing product launches.
Smart work Kellogg’s. Kudos.
Checkout storefront.is (video below) – a brand new online marketplace for pop-up shop venues – and SampleCentral’s network of sample stores.
Or if you prefer your pop-up retail in pixels, take a look at the free open-source online pop-up shop WordPress theme ‘PopShop‘ developed by the Syzygy Group of digital agencies; it’s a simple one page pop-up shop for launching new products – where you pay for your download, sample or video content with a social share.
Thanks to word of mouth agency Onva‘s Marta Drozdz for the heads-up – we’re heading down to the Tweet Shop now.
