6 Successful Marketing Campaigns in Retail
Tim Hortons and Justin Bieber marketing campaign
Even when you are as large as McDonald’s with a worldwide presence you still have to fight for your share of a consumer’s wallet. Whether its ads in your social media feed, hauls on YouTube or a dancing TikTok marketing is here to stay and for good reason. We are inundated with information every day and brands need to find a way to stand out and grab your attention. If you are building a brand or trying to turn one around then consider how some of the best in the business use marketing to drive sales.
1. McDonald’s. One of the major marketing initiatives McDonald’s launched in 2020 which helped turn around revenues was a promotion called “Famous Orders” where it promoted the McDonald’s meals celebrities like Travis Scott and BTS enjoy eating. The promotion first launched in the fall of 2020 and ran until September 2021, featuring different celebrities every few months. The promotion was so successful it helped boost McDonald’s sales not only in 2020 but in 2021 it helped McDonald’s to reverse its declining sales trend.
When McDonald’s entered into a partnership with Scott for its Famous Orders promotion it released a limited time offer of Scott’s favourite meal on September 8, 2020, a Quarter Pounder with cheese, fries with barbecue sauce and a Sprite. Sounds pretty basic doesn’t it? It doesn’t even have any special ingredients. I am sure that before the promotion was launched someone at McDonald’s was secretly thinking, that’s not going to work, there isn’t anything to it.
But that level of simplicity made it seem like maybe that’s what he actually likes to order from McDonald’s. Scott’s backstory is that he grew up in Houston eating that very meal at McDonald’s and long before the partnership took place he talked about his love for McDonald’s and posted about it on social media. “Travis is a true McDonald’s fan having grown up visiting our restaurants in Houston, not to mention [he’s] one of the biggest musical acts and cultural icons in the world,” said Morgan Flatley, McDonald’s United States Chief Marketing Officer.
Any doubters were quickly silenced once the meal became so popular McDonald’s ran out of its ingredients within eight days after launch. McDonald’s traffic and app downloads in the United States were also up by 9% and 11% respectively the week of the launch and posts made about Scott on McDonald’s Instagram page generated five times as much the normal engagement.
Now why would Gen Z storm McDonald’s to get a meal that already exists, something they could buy at any time? Consumers, especially younger consumers are obsessed with celebrity culture. People like the idea of having a taste of the lifestyle of those they seek to emulate.
2. Untuckit. Sometimes the best action is the one most people aren’t taking. Menswear direct to consumer brand UNTUCKit realized this when it first tried to figure out how to acquire its first set of customers.
In the early days of the brand the company tried the traditional step of hiring a PR agency to gain exposure. But after going down that route UNTUCKit decided to take the unconventional approach of firing its PR agency. If felt the PR it was given was not providing the brand with the exposure it needed. Instead UNTUCKit placed ads on sports radio and in print airline magazines. While these are not the kind of marketing moves that everyone is talking about these vehicles often have more captive audiences than a fast-moving social media feed.
You can try the conventional but if it’s not working why not take an unconventional approach? Taking the less travelled route may have less competition and better exposure. The exposure can also come at a cheaper price. UNTUCKit found that, at the time, for approximately $350 it could reach 200,000 potential customers using radio ads. After its first local radio ad placement in 2013 UNTUCKit had 1,500 website visitors in less than 10 seconds versus a normal level of traffic of 150-200 visitors.
Speaking about this approach, UNTUCKit CEO Aaron Sanandres said: "I think that the biggest lesson is to be curious, right, think about the different, maybe nonconventional ways, that you can get your message to the right audience, whoever that audience is for your particular business." "As long as you can measure it."
Often what looks like a challenge (i.e. your Facebook advertising budget is running out) can be a blessing in disguise as it forces you to think of more creative ways to acquire new customers.
3. Tim Hortons. The success of McDonald’s famous orders campaign was not lost on other fast food chains and in 2021 Tim Hortons launched a marketing campaign with Canadian pop superstar Justin Bieber. For this promotion Tim Hortons launched limited edition Timbiebs which featured three new flavours of Timbits (donut holes). The new flavours, personally selected by Bieber, were white fudge, sour cream chocolate chip and birthday cake waffle. "Doing a Tim Hortons collab has always been a dream of mine," said Bieber. "I grew up on Tim Hortons and it's always been something close to my heart."
Tim Hortons also launched limited edition merch as part of the campaign which quickly sold out. The promotion was a huge success, boosting awareness of the Tim Hortons brand and increasing sales. Joseph Cil, the former CEO of Restaurant Brands International (which owns Tim Hortons), said the promotion was: “one of the more successful traffic-driving initiatives in recent memory and outperformed our internal expectations.” There was also an “unprecedented” boost in social engagement and visits from younger customers.
One of the reasons the promotion was so successful is because Justin Bieber is a long time fan of the brand and had posted about Tim Hortons on his social media channels many times over the years. Then when the partnership launched it made a lot of sense to his fans who then went out to see what a Bieber and Tim Hortons collab would taste like. Celebrity collaborations don’t always work but when they do its likely because they are authentic and don’t stray far from the brand identity of the celebrity or the company they are collaborating with. “Justin is so fervent in how much he loves Tims,” said Hope Bagozzi, chief marketing officer at Tim Hortons. “That is the perfect recipe for a collaboration. It’s not forced.”
Tim Hortons has been in business for nearly 60 years. As a brand ages its customers tend to age along with it making it difficult to acquire younger customers that have a higher lifetime value. Partnering with Bieber allowed Tim Hortons to effectively tap into a younger customer base without alienating its older customers. "We won't ever take our eye off staying relevant to our loyal guests, but at the same time, you do have to be mindful of your guests of tomorrow. We're committed to having a good balance of not changing so much that the loyal guest stops recognizing who we are," said Bagozzi.
The promotion was also outside of Tim Hortons’ marketing bread and butter which is partnerships with professional hockey players demonstrating it’s important not to get stuck doing the same thing over and over. “It opens us up to a different audience and a different conversation beyond just hockey,” said Bagozzi. “Justin has wide appeal, but definitely does appeal to younger guests.”
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4. Taco Bell. In 2019 Taco Bell took over the 70 room V Palm Springs Hotel in California to provide Taco Bell lovers with an experience they wouldn’t forget. First, the fast-food chain invited people to book a room at the hotel which it dubbed “The Bell: A Taco Hotel & Resort.” Rooms ranged in price from $169 to $299 and once they were available within two minutes all of the rooms were booked.
The lucky guests were then treated to a bonanza. “We had salons where women got Taco Bell icons on their nails. Men and women could get icons shaved into their heads. There were Aqua Lily synchronized swimmers in the pool and a training camp for synchronized swimmers in the main pool. Every morning there were hot yoga classes. We curated an amazing experience for our fans,” said Taco Bell’s former senior director of retail engagement and experience Jennifer Arnoldt.
Guests were also treated to food items Taco Bell was testing at the time including jalapeño popcorn chicken. The event took place from August 8th to August 12th, 2019. When it was all said and done there were 400 guests and the campaign generated 4.4 billion impressions online, which was the highest number of impressions the brand has ever had for a product launch at that time. “When you think about Taco Bell, we’re all about the social nature of the brand. We found a way to bring fans together and provide experiences for them they couldn’t get anywhere else. The idea of a Taco Bell hotel made perfect sense,” said Arnoldt. Nothing great is created overnight, Taco Bell worked on the initiative for two years.
5. Dunkin. In 2020 Dunkin’ partnered with Charlie D’Amelio, who was the most followed person on TikTok at the time. D’Amelio posted about Dunkin’ on her own accord for a while and racked up millions of impressions for the brand for free. Dunkin’ saw the potential of working with the social media star and then formalized a partnership with her.
The partnership with D’Amelio included Dunkin’s release of two limited time offer drinks named after her, The Charli, a Dunkin’ cold brew with whole milk and three pumps of caramel swirl and The Charli Cold Foam which adds Dunkin’s Sweet Cold Foam to the The Charli with cinnamon on top. Dunkin’ also released a Charli x Dunkin’ merch collection. Not wanting to stop there, Dunkin’ also gave fans the opportunity to join a virtual hangout with D’Amelio where she provided tips on how to create viral social media videos.
The partnership was so popular Dunkin’ sold hundreds of thousands of Charli’s cold brew drink within the first five days after the launch of the campaign. By the second day Dunkin’s cold brew sales increased by 45%. There was also a 57% increase in Dunkin’ app downloads the day the drink first launched. “For us to be able to put her drink on the menu board and have that partnership really showed how successful it can be to really just audit our consumers’ habits and then reflect them on the menu,” said Jill Nelson, Dunkin’s head of marketing strategy. “We saw people not only coming in and buying it, but actually downloading and ordering through the app.”
6. Harry’s. There is great power in having someone personally refer a new and exciting product to a friend. If you think about many of the purchases you have made over the past year, the movies you watched or the books you read or the restaurants you ate at you will see that your actions are often a reflection of the tastes of those around you.
You may be familiar with Harry’s, the brand that started out selling razors, shaving cream and other grooming products to consumers online. After only seven short years in 2019 Harry’s was valued at $1.37 billion. Critical to successfully launching the brand was a word of mouth campaign. The campaign resulted in Harry’s getting close to 100,000 email sign ups in the week before its eCommerce website went live. In an excerpt from Tim Ferriss’ blog Jeff Raider, co-founder and co-CEO of Harry’s tells the story of how they got so many signups:
“The idea for our campaign was built around our belief that the most powerful and effective way to be introduced to our new company was through a credible referral. Thus, we focused on building a campaign that helped people to spread the word to their friends.”
“The fundamental mechanic of our campaign was a game: complete the challenge of referring friends and earn prizes. It seems pretty straightforward—and it is—but we think that what those prizes are, and how they are doled out, is critical to getting people excited play. Not all reward structures are created equal. Here are a few things what worked for us.”
“First, we tried to make our rewards tangible: free Harry’s product. On the page, we very clearly emphasized, ‘Invite Friends and Earn Product.’ It was the one message on the page where we did away with mystery and left nothing up to interpretation. We didn’t want there to be any doubt about what people might receive.”
“To earn the first tier prize—a free shave cream—you had to make only five successful referrals. The next tier was only five further referrals. If you signed up ten friends, you earned a free razor.” “The jump between tier two and tier three was more significant but still not overwhelming: 25 referrals and you’d receive a shave set with our more premium handle, The Winston. Finally, even the grand prize was within reach: a year of free shaving for those who referred 50 friends.”
“We started there, with our own friends. We had our team of 12 employees seed the campaign to their friends.” “When all was said and done, we had collected by our estimation over 85K valid email addresses (and over 100K emails in total) in the span of seven days.”
This example demonstrates the power even a small team of people has to get the word out. Imagine the amount of money it would have taken to gain a similar amount of email signups via Facebook or Instagram ads. The people you know are more valuable than you think.