I belong to a social club of sorts, a group of gentlemen who gather on Thursday evenings to indulge in a few of the finer drafts offered by our local craft brewers. Back in college you might have referred to our get togethers as a frat or something equally tawdry. However, I can assure you that our club is nothing of the sort, although it is a club, make no mistake. One can’t just stagger in off the street and buy us a round to get invited (although you’re welcome to try). We pay membership dues and we support a number of local charities, including the Food Bank and a Children’s Literacy Program. We also lend our collective corporate expertise out to small businesses on occasion. We were sitting around the table last Thursday night enjoying a new organically brewed pilsner when a few of the guys started throwing around ideas about another area we could focus our considerable marketing skills on. At this point I should mention that fully half of our membership have either a Marketing degree or an MBA or both, so that’s why these sort of things keep coming up instead of more typical drinking topics like football, golf, hockey or beach volleyball. The couple who own the organic brewery happened to pop by that night and a few of us approached them with our ideas for expanding their business. Key to this effort was the idea of having high quality, embroidered tee shirts and hoodies made up. We’ve had shirts printed before to promote some of our club causes and events and I firmly believe that a small business like a craft brewery is going to get a lot more bang for its buck by giving away tee shirts to customers than it would ever see through radio or print advertising. Not only that, but the campaign keeps going for as long as people keep the shirts. It’s brilliant. The brewery owners took a little convincing, but when we sat down and explained the costs associated with a mid-market radio campaign compared to the cost of having a few hundred tee shirts printed up and distributed, they were impressed. I pulled out my iPhone and showed them a site where they could order shirts made from certified organic cotton -something they could use as part of the promotion to tie into their organic beer. That sealed the deal. The boys and I come pretty cheap as far as marketing expertise is considered, so long as you catch us on a Thursday night. It only cost the organic brewery folks a few cases of their product and a dozen tee shirts.
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