Time Change

First — the time change is stu­pid. Can’t we just move it 1/2 hour and stop the madness?

And now… the rest of the story.

The time change in Spring gen­er­ally makes every­one really tired for a few days — par­tic­u­larly those of us who have to wake up early. It typ­i­cally takes me about three or four days for me to bounce back from the big spring for­ward. Being tired is a prob­lem, and great mar­ket­ing ideas solve prob­lems. Enter Cari­bou Coffee…

Cari­bou cof­fee has it’s own prob­lem. It must com­pete with cof­fee giant Star­bucks to get cus­tomers. Star­bucks is more well known, has more loca­tions, and has a styl­ish brand that many caf­feine addicted peo­ple like me love. For Cari­bou to be suc­cess­ful it needs to get peo­ple to change their behav­ior. They need to get peo­ple to try some­thing they don’t nec­es­sar­ily know about, when there is already some­thing they love. Not an easy task.

So we have estab­lished the fol­low­ing two problems:

• Prob­lem one — The switch to day­light sav­ings time is hor­ri­ble and makes us all very tired.
• Prob­lem two — Cari­bou needs to find a way to get you to give them a try.

Here is the great mar­ket­ing part. Cari­bou is tak­ing advan­tage of the time change to try to get caf­feine lovers to change where they spend their time and ulti­mately their money. How? They are using the time change as a rea­son to give away FREE ESPRESSO with pur­chase of a cof­fee on the Sun­day and Mon­day fol­low­ing the change. This is smart, timely, and a great oppor­tu­nity to gen­er­ate pos­i­tive word of mouth, make some new friends, and poten­tially gain some new loyal customers.

This pro­mo­tion seems so obvi­ous, yet it is cre­ative, orig­i­nal, and effec­tive. Proof that great ideas are all around us. Find a prob­lem, develop and idea, and con­vince peo­ple that the time is right for a change.

Time to move the clocks ahead and get to bed. Maybe I will see you at Cari­bou tomor­row. I will be the tired guy chug­ging espresso.