Not all products are as highly differentiated as a walking cane with GPS or a restaurant with deaf servers. These are a lazy marketers dream as the products usually sell themselves with little prompting. However a good portion of the marker is run-of-the-mill goods trying to stand out in a sea of similar products.
This is where Evian a water bottle brand faced a dilemma. How could they market a product essentially the same as competitors and one which most consumers could get for free? Strictly brand loyal water bottle enthusiasts are few and far between and so marketers would usually rely on price differentiation. Yet Evian managed to get a large following and stir a social media storm of followers tweeting about plain bottled water!
Evian took to twitter using a real-time campaign to dish out product samples. Anyone in certain areas of New York City who tweeted using the hashtag #Evianbottleservice would receive a sample within seven minutes.
This campaign was extremely successful in generating brand awareness and engagement. Engagement on tweets passed the benchmark for similar consumer packaged goods by 80 percent. Also 75,000 engagements were generated on Twitter resulting from the campaign.
Businesses with little product differentiation can learn from this that social media can be a powerful tool for getting businesses on the radar.