Dora and Hello Kitty showbags at the Royal Adelaide Show – how can you craft an experience like a child explorer or cool cat?
Have you walked through the showbag pavillion at the Royal Adelaide Show yet this year?
As usual, it is a hot, humid, bustling, noisy experience with excited kids and frenzied parents scrambling about like worker ants as they scurry in to the bait and then scurry back out again.
Imagine if these people were this excited about your products or services?
Imagine if the people you are trying to court through your marketing efforts were consumed by a childlike combination of impatience and expectation as they made their way into your world?
Before you dismiss the idea out of hand, muttering things like, nobody gets excited by sacrificial anodes or financial planning or batteries or extra virgin olive oil, please think again.
In some way, shape or form, every purchase decision consumers make (domestic and commercial) is meeting some need or want, and every transaction offers a range of experience options from difficult to routine to titillating.
Our challenge is to see if showbags can give us any insights into opportunities we might be missing in making a transaction with us something to be anticipated and treasured.
Let’s start by stripping down the showbag experience into its different parts and then investigate what that might mean for your business.
What’s a showbag made of?
A showbag is more than just a plastic bag filled with trinkets and lollies.
I would argue showbags work on three levels:
- limited availability during a festival, with expectations developed over generations
- items are presented as a ‘wonder pack’
- wild card items project value and make it hard to determine price
So what can this mean to us? Here are some thoughts.
The first point is the one that is not easily replicated. Anybody can pull a package together but the showbag factor includes history, heritage and habit that has formed over generations. So on this point, it is worth pondering whether your sector, your target market has its own routines and rituals, its own gatherings and conventions that give you opportunities for surprising or delighting the market. In other words, what could you do that grabs attention and fosters strong goodwill and ‘chatter power’ among your target market and its influencers? While foodstuffs are an obvious category for this sort of thinking, it is worth contemplation by us all. For example, a producer or retailer of security cameras with exceptional picture quality could offer a free photo booth in a stand, with images emailed to event attendees. That would be unexpected, give the vendor contact information and surprise people by an unconventional example of a security camera at work. In some ways, it reminds me of the old Palmolive dishwashing liquid positioned as a hand cream – ‘pretty green – you know you’re soaking in it?’
The second point goes further into exploring whether there are particular combinations of products or services that could be packaged, presented and priced in a new way. We don’t have to only think in terms of sample bags or test drives, but the showbag teaches us to think in terms of reward and curiosity. I have particularly liked the fact that my tyre retailer gave me quite a value pack when I bought new tyres including free, regular rotations and the ability to drop by any time to have my tyres inflated for no cost, by an expert using their properly calibrated equipment. For me, it is free and offers peace of mind. For them, it keeps me in their orbit and gives them insights into how my tyres are travelling and the ability to suggest maintenance or replacement in a timely manner. I call that a win win.
The third point suggests we search for items, resources or attitudes that add value to an interaction between you and your prospective customers or influencers. In the Dora bag, pictured above, there are so many little trinkets they fudge your ability to determine the real retail value. I then noticed, as my daughters opened their Dora backpacks in their showbags, there were more surprises inside. As the young woman asked on the Cadbury stand, ‘what novelty’ do you want?, it occurred to me that there is a fine line between adding the perception of value and adding a worthless trinket that is obviously just a trinket. So, our challenge is to determine what little ‘extras’ can you offer that competitors do not AND would be perceived as value by your market. It could be a proper audit, it could be an online estimation tool, it could be an attitude of care or a self-diagnosis resource that helps your market make better, more informed decisions. One of the Baker Marketing offerings on this front is our Baker’s Shout device. It is a simple form on our Facebook Page that allows anyone, clients or otherwise, to submit a marketing question and have our team discuss it and send some thoughts, for free, during one of our Friday night wind up sessions. It is fun to work together in one big team and it shares a little of the excess marketing capacity we have as we prepare for each weekend.
When you get home from a visit to the Royal Adelaide Show this week, why not ponder some of these lessons from the showbags and help more people ‘roll up, roll up’ to your business?
