Post is courtesy of Bernice Grossman who read this article in DIRECT Magazine. Great example of using a little ingenuity to get the customer to notice you in a time of crisis.
Imagine you’re exhibiting at a trade conference and your booth doesn’t show. Bad news, right? Not necessarily.
Jordan Ayan, CEO of e-mail service provider SubscriberMail, recently found himself in such a situation when FedEx failed to deliver his booth to an American Marketing Association conference in Orlando, FL.
Since FedEx was to blame, Ayan decided that it should be part of the solution. He and his colleagues went to every local FedEx store they could find and grabbed as many FedEx boxes as they could get to build a makeshift booth. “We told them we had a lot of shipping to do,” Ayan says.
They then went to Kinko’s and created a large sign to hang in the booth that read: “Guess when FedEx will deliver our booth and win a box of Omaha Steaks (delivered by UPS!).”
To complete the gag, they acquired a volleyball, put a handprint on it with mud and called it “Wilson.” The name refers to the beach volleyball with a bloody handprint that Tom Hanks talks to in the movie “Cast Away,” where Hanks plays a FedEx employee stranded on an island with a bunch of FedEx boxes after a company plane he was on crashes.
Turns out FedEx did SubscriberMail a favor. “We had more people come to our booth than we’ve ever had at any show we’ve ever done,” Ayan says. Out of just over 800 attendees, more than 280 entered the contest. As for the real booth, FedEx delivered it on the last day.
Anyone else have some b2b customer delight stories?
Scott Lieberman :: Mar.11.2007 ::
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