Streetwise Marketing, Street-side

A couple of weeks back, I got a call from a marketing manager of En Point Technologies- a tech company based in Southern California. They had heard about The Chai Cart and asked if they could sponsor it at an event. From what I understood, it seemed like they wanted me to set up the cart in a courtyard in front of the building at 150 Spear St., where I would hand the attendees a dinCloud branded commuter cup of chai as they walked in to go to their office. 

 Sounds simple, right? Except when I got there at 7:45am on Tuesday morning, I realized the courtyard was in fact in the next building, in front of 160 Spear St. To add clutter to the confusion, there was construction going on in front of 150 Spear St. One of En Point’s employees, Shirley, who lives in the Bay Area, had come out to help with the event. She too had the same information I did (she was roped in last minute to oversee this event) and was equally unaware of the logistics. 

 This was when I was told the back-story. En Point Tech. owns a Cloud Service Provider called dinCloud. Forrester Research was hosting this event on Cloud Sourcing, but En Point was not invited to be part of it. Handing out chai in dinCloud branded commuter cups was En Point’s way to make their presence felt at the event. So, clearly, we were not welcome to not crash the event and could not set up a table in the lobby or anywhere else in the building. 

 I had ~200 cups of chai and I didn’t want to throw it all out. Thinking quickly, I told Shirley that we could set up on the sidewalk in front of the building. We were giving stuff for free, who would object to that? She was game. At first, it seemed awkward, soliciting people to take free drinks, but soon Shirley became a pro at peddling street chai and cookies. We stood there for about an hour, like two street hawkers talking about Cloud Computing. 

 Would you think this was unusual? Well, yes, one person did and he happened to be an analyst at Forrester Research, @Staten7, who tweeted 

#dinCloud crashes #Forr sourcing workshop in SF. Providing free chai and cookies in front of our bldg. Nice guerilla mktg. 

Two days later, I was cc-ed on an email from En Pointe’s Senior Marketing Manager sent to their CEO and the rest of the Marketing staff talking about the tweet. The team was excited that they got noticed. I had a hearty laugh. To be quite honest, I was feeling a bit bad that En Point had wasted money on this event, as the logistics didn’t work out as planned. So, it amused me when I read that it actually worked in their favor! In all the years I spent as a technology Marketing professional, I must say, this was surely the most unconventional marketing tactic I’ve seen. Much kudos to the team at En Pointe for thinking out of the box and being bold to execute something not many companies would!