There are many creative solutions you can try to improve your marketing efforts that will increase your number of customers. In the past, most marketers focused on distributing posters, brochures or postcards. However, with the transition to the digital age, these options have become obsolete and costly. With each passing day, business owners cross their limits and create crazy marketing ideas that give us an enormous inspiration. Despite being risky, many unusual and unique ideas can instantly get viral, especially when they're entertaining and worth giving a mention!
If you're looking for creativity boost, here are eleven different marketing campaigns that might inspire your next project!
1. Game of Truth or Dare in NYC
On 2012, with around budget of $23, Chelsea Davison left 300 different “Truth or Dare?” cards in Washington Square Park, New York. “New Yorkers don't usually pay much attention to their environment", said Chelsea. So, what better way than to bring back the shameful game of middle school to make people friendlier (even for only one day).
Later on, after videos spread like wildfire, Chelsea has got copyright on the activity.
2. "Cat lovers deserve to die!"
The Lung Cancer Alliance- LCA wanted to educate people that lung cancer can target everyone. Most people think the disease can only occur in certain groups of people: smokers, people with weak immune systems, etc. But LCA knew that this type of cancer could happen to everyone.
Therefore, they prepared posters to eliminate these myths. Posters were created for people in certain segments of society: from crazy old aunts to hipsters, or cat lovers with the motto “They deserve to die”.
Additionally, they shared informative messages on their website, making their marketing strategy even more successful. As a result, the campaign was enormously successful: in just three days the website generated the same traffic it had received in the six months prior to the campaign!
3. "The Most Powerful Alkaline Battery in the Universe"
Real Time Marketing can create a strong bond with the customers and make them easily share the company's viral posts in their social media accounts.
Right after the release of Star Wars, Duracell launched a campaign showing Darth Vader putting Duracell batteries into his lightsaber. Coming out at the right moment, it made everyone laugh.
4. "More Powerful Than Pain"
One of the most creative marketing strategies is "Guerrilla Marketing", an unconventional method aiming to boost the brand recognition. Guerrilla marketing campaigns are often cheap, innovative and highly creative. Usually they strive to go viral and contribute to the brand’s image as quick as possible.
Ibuprofen, the British pharmaceutical brand, managed to depict the feeling of a headache in a remarkable way. Their creative ad with the slogan "More Powerful Than Pain" succeeded grabbing customers attention for quite a long time.
5. Simplicity: The Ultimate Sophistication
In order to be creative, you don't necessarily need huge projects and expensive productions. Sometimes simplicity is the ultimate marketing solutions for your business.
McDonald’s created this cool print ad featuring a box of fries carved out of a potato. The ad effectively suggests the fast food chains fries are totally fresh, natural, and downright healthful. Briefly, this image helped to develop more wholesome perception of McDonald’s on customers’ mind.
6. "Happy Father's Day!"
Sometimes thinking in a simple way can lead to a road of creativity and originality more than designing complex and costly ads. Durex developed this minimalistic and simple print ad for father's day and tried to tease its competitors in a remarkable way.
7. QR Code campaign for the Olympics
An innovative QR Code campaign was launched by Turkish Airlines for the Olympics in London. The company transformed some national flags into QR codes and then placed them on a number of bus stops all over the city. They added a little gamification by turning their campaign into a scavenger hunt.
The users who found and scanned the most QR codes with different flags had the chance to win round-trip tickets from Turkish Airlines' over 200 destinations.
Through the mobile site of the campaign, people could see all locations and the number of times the national flags have been scanned.
8. "Winter Love"
Neutrogena is another example of an unusual marketing campaign. Neutrogena created an application called “winter love", which sent an ad notification whenever the phone temperature dropped below 10 degrees. The app additionally offered suitable products to prevent your hands from cracking in the cold.
9. Canon Instazoom Experience
Instagram is an effective way to promote your brand or product. Canon's new camera had an innovative feature for Instagram users.
Users were able to share all photos taken by Canon‘s Instazoom camera. Even though those days Instagram had not have the zoom feature, Canon took first step before its rivals and designed one.
Canon's campaign attracted a lot of attention by users. The company created various Instagram accounts. In those accounts, Canon shared one photo in nine tracks. When users clicked on the tags placed in the photos, they were redirected to another account, where they could see the same photo, but zoomed. Here is how it worked:
This interesting and highly entertaining campaign reached millions with users tagging their friends in comments.
10. "Give a Hand to Wild Life"
The advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi and the body painter Guido Daniele made these creative and incredible images for the WWFs “Give a Hand to Wild Life” campaign. The philosophy of this campaign was to support the world’s most endangered species in an entertaining way.
WWF later on asked people to share their own favourite animal hand art on their Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts using the hash tags #GiveAHandToWildlife and #WearItWild. Thousands of people shared them and got involved in order to show their passion for wildlife. The money raised through donations thanks to these campaigns helped supporting WWF's attempt to tackle threats on our precious nature. In addition, this brilliant and creative marketing campaign won a Grand Prix award at Cannes.
11. World's Comfiest Font: "Soffa Sans"
Ikea released a free font called Soffa Sans which is described as the comfiest font in the world.
Materials published on the Internet related to the company's campaign “Design Your Own Couch" have inspired this font. According to Ikea : “A sofa is much more than just a seat. It’s where you unwind, catch up on your favourite book and spend nights in with the family. And with our sofa planners, you can create your own sofa, one that fits not only your room but also your needs. Choose from different sizes, layouts and colours to make it perfect for you.”
The tool allows customers to design templates and configurations from Ikea couches. The font style is available in white, blue and gray colors. Soffa Sans features 1434 products and if the font set is to be created in real life, its value would correspond to $ 134 500.
Which of these is your favourite creative marketing strategy? Don’t forget to share our post and your thoughts on it!
