A fresh marketing idea from Salad Spinners

Last Friday, evening commute. I finished my book just a few minutes into the trip, so I looked up to check out the train car's ads. I saw a cute one for Salad Spinners, a local chain of create-your-own salad lunch spots, but while the headline and visual were nice, what really intrigued me was ant copy underneath. It congratulated me for reading the fine print and offered a word puzzle. Solve the puzzle, the ad promised, and you could qualify for a prize.

The puzzle was pretty simple, and I emailed Rich Levy the answer from my Blackberry. Yes, the CEO's personal email address was listed on a subway ad.

Before the weekend was over, I'd received a reply from Rich saying that his marketing team would get me the first of my rewards early in the week.

True to his word, I received a reusable $1.00 coupon Monday morning. And today I got another email from Rich:

Thank you for solving our puzzle on the CTA. In doing so you have identified yourself to me as someone who is in the know and pays attention to whats going on in this city - and someone I would like to seek more advice from in the future.

This has been a very fun marketing experiment. So far we have had over 300 people that solved the puzzle and emailed us.

And in addition to the re-usable $1 bill that we sent you, I would like to buy you lunch. All I need you to do is complete this short survey and shortly thereafter (less than 3 days) I will email you a code that you can use at any Salad Spinners location for a free salad.

Warm Regards (especially this week)
Rich Levy
Head Tomato

Now, I've always liked Salad Spinners. They seem committed to American farmers and theirfood is fresh and tasty (although they've been known to get my order wrong on occasion). But I've never talked about their restaurants.

Until now. By adding a spark of creativity (and interactivity) to an otherwise standard transit campaign, Rich Levy and his marketing team have found 300 new brand ambassadors for their brand.

Portillo's, are you listening?

It's been about 9 months since I published my correspondence with Portillo's, a Chicago chain of hot dog restaurants. I was concerned about trans fats and a little disturbed that they didn't make their nutritional information available on their website. Well, they admitted that they do indeed use the unhealthy fake fats and claimed they're too small a chain to afford to calculate their nutrition information.

Scared by what I don't know, I haven't been there since. But I've been tempted--there's always a long line at the Forest Park drive-through and their food, while probably about as bad for you as it gets, sure tastes good!

Anyway, it seems someone in the Portillo's marketing department needs to take note of this little thing called blogging. You see, I check StatCounter periodically to see what kind of search terms bring readers here, and I've discovered that at least one visitor every day arrives at my old Portillo's post by Googling "Portillo's nutrition info," "Portillo's transfats," or something similar. Which makes me a leading consumer voice for Portillo's. And I think it's plain to see I'm probably not putting out the kind of word of mouth they're looking for.

So I'm giving Portillo's a second chance. I emailed them again asking for comment and reminding them that I'm out here and my post is getting a lot of hits. I want to know if they'll reconsider their nutrition information policy and reconsider keeping trans fats on the menu. I'll be sure to share whatever I hear back here and on the Chicago Mom's Blog.

3/3/08: According to my site meter, this post gets between 10 and 50 hits a day-- proving that consumers want to know what's in their Portillo's meal. If you have a moment, please show you were here by leaving a comment.

3/11/09: Another year and even more daily hits (50-100) from folks looking for Portillo's nutrition information.

Southwest Airlines: I think I'm in LUV

Apparently customer service is not dead, even in the much maligned airline industry. Quite the opposite. You see, on June 18th, Southwest Airlines took a poor customer experience, one which was due to a situation out of their control, and made the best of it. A thunderstorm threatened the Chicago area and air traffic controllers put a stop to all north and westbound flights, including our Chicago to Omaha route. We boarded our plane at 3:15pm for a 3:30 flight, but we ended up sitting on the tarmac for a full three hours.

Now a three hour delay for an 80 minute flight is exceptional, and since I was 36 weeks pregnant and traveling with a 2 1/2 year old to a funeral, it wasn't fun either. But my husband and I appreciated the crew's attitude. Every 15-20 minutes, the pilot would update the passengers on the situation and give us a revised estimate of when he thought we might take off. The flight attendants handed out water, peanuts and pretzels and did their best to entertain the unaccompanied minors across the aisle.

But while the behavior of Southwest employees on 2081 kept me from swearing off flying the discount airline ever again, the letter we received from Southwest has forever cemented my loyalty to the company. You see, they sent us unsolicited apologies along with a $75 travel voucher for each traveler.

Here's an excerpt from the letter, which was dated just three days after the flight:

"[W]e truly regret you had this unfortunate experience, and we would like to have another opportunity to provide you with better memories of Southwest Airlines. In this spirit, I have enclosed a LUV Voucher that we invite you to apply toward the purchase of a future reservation with us. Of course, this goodwill gesture may not offset the total amount of each person's inconvenience, but I hope it will be accepted as our acknowledgement of the frustrations created by this situation."

Did every passenger get this treatment or did we qualify because we're Rapid Rewards members who purchased full price tickets (the only fares available on one day's notice)? I don't know, but I hope we aren't the only ones feeling the love.

And there you have it. Thanks to Southwest's unexpected, authentic gesture, I'm spreading positive word-of-mouth for a company that I could just have easily been complaining about.

Nissan embraces nontraditional marketing

Here's an example of a great, very inexpensive word-of-mouth marketing campaign Nissan launched to promote its keyless ignitions to African-American consumers. Not sure why this is an "ethnic" campaign since it seems like it would build buzz in any community, but I'm guessing that the most ethnic element is the locations where the keys are dropped.