The Friendship Egg And A Marketing Lesson

Becky McCray alerted me to this story and G.L. Hoffman’s comments.

It reminded of the “Where’s George?” website that lets people track where their dollar bills have been by the bill’s serial number.

This little country girl wrote her name and address on an egg sold at the town market. The egg ended up on a  merchant vessel and the ship’s cook wrote it down before using the egg creating a life long relationship with the little girl.

If you’re selling a “real world product” (even if you’re a reseller for someone else but you actually handle the merchandise before it gets to the end user) is there some way to personalize your product  ala “The Friendship Egg” and “Where’s George?” to get people to relate back to you personally?

Labels (or rubber stamps) are inexpensive and a website can be fairly straightforward. You can even draw the customer’s attention to it at the point of check out. Could you offer…

1. Log on to www.________.com for a special discount on your next purchase

2. Enter your digital vacation photo in our contest at www.___________.com

3. “Learn the secret behind our Amazon Rain Forest shampoo by visiting www.______.com and entering this password”

How can you get customers to bounce back to you?

Here’s a place we visited this summer in Crow Buttes , South Dakota that was charming and convenient and ideally positioned for one of these “bounceback” techniques. But they never captured our name or email address. But here’s a picture of the general store there. A beautiful little business!