SURREAL makes healthy cereal. The business is also very creative with marketing and is well known for its scrappy approach to building a loveable brand.
For any young startup, getting noticed isn't easy.
It's even harder when you throw in the rising costs of paid advertising. Then there's the fact that your ads get lost in a sea of others, and it's easy for people to just swipe on by.
Earlier this year, Surreal wanted to get the attention of London's city workers without getting lost in a sea of ads, so they did this instead…
One of Surreal's co-founders stood at one end of London Bridge giving out free spoons.
As you can imagine, this grabbed a lot of attention and sparked curiosity.
Why would you want a free spoon on the way to work?
Anyone who did take a free spoon would learn what it was for only once they got to the far end of the bridge.
There they'd find Surreal's other co-founder offering up free cereal. Everyone curious enough to have taken a free spoon was given one. Genius.
They could have run local Facebook ads or even stood outside the station giving out free samples, but where's the fun in that? Would that get people talking?
Surreal didn't just get its cereal into the hands (and mouths) of potential customers; it got the brand into their minds too. And they did it in a way that was hard to forget and, importantly, easy to talk about.
We can only imagine how many people went to work with a bowl of cereal and had to explain where it came from.
Digital marketing is not your only option. Find the space other brands aren't using. Think about how you can get your product into the hands of your customers, at the right time, in a way that will get them talking about your brand in an interesting way.
3 Questions to help you come up with creative marketing ideas:
Healthy, tasty, fun cereal? 👉 surreal.co.uk
Keep being an outlier 💪
J + K
For bootstrapped entrepreneurs – how to grow your business without spending a fortune.
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