Restaurants, wineries, breweries and retail stores have a captive audience through the deployment of custom retail bumper stickers. Besides their alternative placement on everything from windows and blackboards to laptops and guitar cases, bumper stickers are front and center every time you sit behind a car in traffic.
So, enterprising restaurants, wineries, breweries and retail can use this to their advantage. Think of the bumper sticker as a mini-billboard, only with more view time in congested traffic conditions. An article in Timeout.com notes, “We spend a lot of time behind the wheel here—or, as another way to think of it, in front of bumpers.”
Following this train of thought, here are a couple ways for you to interest your food and beverage and retail customers about bumper stickers to capture attention and measure response:
- Suggest a “mention this code” bumper sticker campaign, where the establishment promotes a discount or value-add offer. One generic example could be: “Mention the word “parched” at xyz brewery for 20% off your tab.” This would be a bumper sticker-only campaign that would measure response against other types of marketing. To do further research, come up with several variations on the same theme with different codes/codewords to see what resonates best.
- Use crowdsourcing to develop a bumper sticker campaign about a retail store, winery, brewery or restaurant. It could be a branding challenge, a way to promote the best company offerings/noteworthy accomplishments, and more. The crowdsourcing process itself can be a way to generate buzz and get some positive PR, regardless of campaign details. Once the campaign unfolds, its success can be measured with some type of offering unique to the bumper sticker.
- Come up with an ultra-cool bumper sticker that the establishment(s) can give to on-site customers. Then measure where, how and how often the sticker shows up.
To reinforce the concept of using bumper stickers as a promotional tool, ask and help your customers answer some technical spec questions about the bumper stickers:
- Should they use removable adhesive? (In this day and age where everything changes on a dime, easy removal is typically a positive inducement.)
- What type of color scheme will be most readable? (While traditional wisdom dictates that dark ink on white/light-colored stock is best, get some info around the company’s existing branding colors and determine what special circumstances might dictate about graphic effects.)
- Do they want to create several different looks to test against each other? (If so, variable data/imaging can take care of everything affordable and efficiently in one run.)