How much is too much?

In 1987 the Finance world was brought to its knees when Wall Street collapsed, sparking a global financial meltdown not seen since the depression. In the movie world however, the finance sector was booming, and Wall Street the film introduced us to Gordon Gecko, the slick trader brilliantly played by Michael Douglas. “Greed is good” became a household saying and its impact is still audible more than 20 years later in the lexicon of today.

Greed has caused subsequent crashes in the financial markets and some people even consider it a deadly sin. Yet like a few of those other ‘deadly’ sins, greed sells. Greed is good marketing.

We all know how much is too much (well, most of us) yet sometimes it just looks too good too pass up! How many people jumped on KFC’s Double Down when it launched (only temporarily) in Australia early this year. The health shit storm  it caused was publicity gold to KFC’s ears.

Causing slightly less furor yesterday was 7-11 as they ran their Slurpee BYO Cup Day. People were invited to bring their own vessel along to 7-11 and fill up for the price of a medium Slurpee ($2.60). It had to fit to 28cm x 26cm size restriction, but this rule appears to have been flouted. There were a whole range of different containers seen, from a KFC bucket to a cup made from Lego. There was even a soccer ball!

Slurpers were encouraged to take photos of themselves and upload to the Slurpee Facebook page with the most voted for vessel wining the owner 1 month’s free Slurpees. Simple, but effective.

7-11, or more specifically Slurpee, have shown to be pretty creative marketers in the past, frequently leveraging their iconic status and passionate fan base to generate effective word of mouth and viral campaigns that they’ve supported with point of sale media. Their nine flavours in Nine weeks campaign  is a good example. Slurpee have also proved to be reactive on a smaller scale from time to time.

Others have been more structured and planned. Leo Burnett were responsible for the excellent Sports Slurpee campaign pushing for Slurping to become an international sport.

BYO Cup day appears to have been a great success for 7-11, generating a bit of publicity, a lot of user generated content across twitter, FB and You Tube and (one can only assume) a lot of sales for a reasonably small outlay (it really can’t cost much to make Slurpees!) it all has the recipe for a clever piece of marketing by 7-11. Edit: Found out Leo Burnett behind this campaign too.

I’m certainly hoping we see it repeated. Because I'm greedy.

Not for the moment though, I’m still working my way through the champagne cooler bucket I filled up yesterday.