Streets Ice cream and Village Roadshow have teamed up to create one of the best hybrid campaigns I have seen for a while. Anyone who bought a Magnum ice cream can redeem the wrapper (via the interweb) for a free movie seat upgrade into Gold Class cinemas (availability permitting).
The promotion is a highly successful 'pull strategy' encouraging consumers to trial both products for the first time or get previous users to recapture the experiential benefits once again. What they have done successfully, is offer extra value without effecting their bottom line.
To clarify this point, Streets only needed to print a little logo on their packets and Village still charged customers for a movie seat, it just sold more ice-creams and filled what would have otherwise been a vacant cinema, potentially creating more space in the standard cinema and additional revenue on tickets, food and drink.
The real and potential problems
Administration can be difficult to implement successfully (from Gold Class point of view). When I was there, the system would not let me upgrade on a Tuesday because ticket prices were discounted and it wouldn't let me pay full price. On another occasion I saw people trying to get the upgrade with the Magnum packet (having not printed out the coupon from the i-net). The idea is to offer exceptional service, in these cases, the manager must be well trained and responsive, it is far more beneficial to bend over for your customer than to belittle them and ruin their product experience.
Length and frequency of promotion is important, so as not to create a 'Myer' style sales period buying habit. If the promotion is too regular, customers will use their entertainment dollars elsewhere and wait for the promotion to come out again before they use the Gold Class service.
Josh Strawczynski's Opinion
This is a great promotion aligning two premium products and leveraging their individual strengths to promote the other. Magnum is a low involvement, high distribution / turnover premium snack. Gold Class is a luxury service that is aspirational to many.
Consumers choosing ice-cream now have a reason to pay the extra and trial a Magnum, and Village have a host of new users trialling Gold Class and making up their own mind if it is worth another $20 per visit to the movies.
Oh and did I mention it was cheap to run? Overall full marks!
Sam Berringer's Opinion
I think there will be pressure from Streets to keep the campaign going as long as possible because of the immediate and measurable effect on sales. Village on the other hand needs to be more responsible, they have profits to be lost if the customers stop paying for the offer. I would like to be a fly on the wall in those meetings!
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