During the summer I was thinking of different marketing campaigns that will help bring awareness of Commuto to students across North America.  Flyering, brand ambassadors, student newspaper ads, sponsorships and other ideas were being thrown around.  At the end we decided on handing out dry erase boards to students.  These boards were around 2 feet by 1 foot, with our logo, slogan and website address around the edges and the middle was white where students can write and erase using markers.  These would hang in their rooms and be a functional marketing ad.

I was assured that students really found these types of boards to be useful and would keep them for the duration of the first semester.  To me this was a no-brainier (which looking back at now is quite comical).  I would get to put a board in their rooms for 4 months for what amounted to around $0.35 per board.  If it was $0.35 per impression it would still be a good deal, but this has the possibility of being much more than that due to the board being seen not only by that student but anyone else who walked into their dorm room.

I mentioned this idea to quite a few people and they all agreed that it was a good idea.  I’m not sure if they agreed with the idea or my enthusiasm of the idea, but they agreed which made me think that I was on the right path with this type of campaign.  So I went through a friend of mine who owns a marketing company which deals with colleges and universities in North America and we started the production of the boards and deciding which schools should receive the boards.  After focusing on a certain demographics, we narrowed the school list to 50 schools, and about 150,000 students.

In my mind, the rate of return on this would be great.  Even if only 5% of students were interested in our service, and I really believe that it’s a wonderful service for all students, then we would potentially get 7,500 new users which I would have been happy with.  Those 7,500 would expand with word of mouth, and could potentially become much more, and finally make Commuto a viable commerce site.

The boards were sent out in the second week of September.  There was a scattered launch, with the west coast schools getting them first and then moving eastward until all schools received them by the end of the third week.  I gave the launch some time to see it’s effects.  Within the first few days nothing happened which worried me, but I was assured by the marketing company that the results will happen within a few weeks following the launch.  I waited and waited and still nothing.  Now don’t get me wrong, we were getting some new users from various schools across the US and Canada, but I couldn’t really attribute it to this campagin because it was basically the same amount of users we were always getting, with no spike whatsoever.

I waited until the middle of October to panic.  I contacted the the marketing company which was shocked at the results.  I asked them to investigate this and they followed up with the student unions and confirmed that they received the boards and that they were handed out.  Now, out of pure curiosity, I would have expected that at least 1,000-2,000 users would have logged onto the site just to see what it’s about.  But it wasn’t even that.  You can’t imagine my disappointment and frustration with this campaign.

I afterward wanted to test the market and launched a very cheap flyering campaign in 4 schools across the US where we handed out 500 flyers per school.  That campaign got me more users than the whole national board campaign.  So what happened?  What went wrong? Did I use an incorrect means to get at the students?

This was a big time lesson for me.  I tried to develop some hype through an expensive campaign and it failed.  Terribly.  Any suggestions on what I did wrong?

Thanks,

Stephen