Sunday, July 26, 2009

Laundry Marketing


The other day, a magical thing happened. I did laundry at the laundromat.

NO! That is not the magical thing!

I did laundry and when I got home, I found that instead of losing a sock, I had gained a promotional t-shirt for some musical called "Lost In Hollywoodland." It has a cartoon drawing of a devil on it... kind of a rockabilly vibe. I inspected it and read it very carefully, trying to remember if it was mine... maybe I just forgot about going to a rockabilly musical about the devil. I paid some serious attention to this t-shirt. I don't think I have ever inspected a piece of clothing so well.

You should know that I consider laundromats to be part of the seventh level of hell, hot, poorly lit, depressing, full of crazy people, hot, bad soft rock, and for some reason, dirty. But, finding this shirt got me to thinking about this idea.

I started thinking about how effective slipping promotional t-shirts or towels into people's laundry could be, especially for certain thing like movies, bands, restaurants, and possibly detergents. Half the battle in advertising is to get someone to pay attention to what you are saying, whether they believe you or remember your message is secondary to getting people to pay attention, and finding that shirt in my laundry had definitely gotten my attention.



Imagine if Fox Searchlight had sent street teams out to laundromats to slip a couple of thousand "Vote For Pedro" t-shirts into people's laundry before the movie came out. The movie was huge, but what if they had been able to plant that buzz out there in people's wardrobes long before it's release?

The key is making really cool shirts. This might be a perfect arena to implement hidden agenda hypercolor shirts. These hypercolors would come out of the dryer looking like plain white t-shirts, but when they cool down, a slogan or message is revealed.

Pairing this idea with the right product is just as important as putting the right socks together, and there are infinite possibilities, so I can't go into all of them. Obviously there is a certain demographic that goes to laundromats, and certain products you would never want to associate with laundry even if only millionaire super models washed clothes at laundromats.

Take this idea and build your guerrilla marketing company around it. Make tons of money. Maybe you can hire me, and give me some of that money.

P.S. Subscribing to Ideas By Chuck is still super cool, so SUBSCRIBE

P.P.S. Drink lots of fluids.

P.P.P.S. I am on twitter- @ideasbychuck

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just gotta make sure nothing bleeds. Unless it was a promo for True Blood or something, but even then some people might be pissed.

I also see this brilliant idea working if the shirts are coupons for something, like a free bbq sandwich. You hand over the shirt, get a free sandwich, and then the coupon can be recycled into another load of laundry!

Or right before valentines' day, you toss bras and panties into men's laundry, to remind them to get their girlies something special, all while giving them that fantasy of finding underwear and meeting the girl it belongs to, in this case a Victoria's Secret salesperson!

Jayne said...

Yeah T-shirts are very influential and are always something a person needs to have on their back.

Unknown said...

Nextplus
Photoshop Touch
Hola Launcher