Berlin: Street, Cool & Marketing

Coolway, a spanish cool clothes brand, is opening a store in Berlin, a german cool capital city.

Pretty cool, but their communication plan on that opening wasn't as kick-ass as expected...

Last week, a lot of pieces of cardboard were spotted in the center of Berlin. Alter-hipster area: organic lunchplaces, bike shops, IT offices. Cool targeting.

This included flash codes, was it some kind of city quest? Or just redirecting to the Coolway homepage? Any mini-advergame mechanic? No idea.

Seeing that, every alter-hipster was having the disruptive idea to impress his alter-hipster mates: taking these light pieces of art and putting them on their shared-flat's walls.

These tiny ropes made the job very quick and easy, even if alter-hipsters don't always carry a knife with them (while the rage-chavs or the trek-hikers do).

I would say the buzz is limited to alter-hipsters and their flat mates. (I mean who else than me is doing a blog post about that?)

And the flash code implementation was probably not worth it.

In addition to the locking mistake, there was also a planning mistake: the following video was posted on the facebook page 24 hours after the "street event". As pretty much all the pieces of cardboards were gone. Pretty not-cool.

Pretty not-cool either: the website isn't showing their list of stores until the user has chosen a Spanish region. No other choice than Spanish regions. Even in the English version.

Bad timing again.

This plan wouldn't had been that bad for an arty-sthetic stuff. But for a commercial purpose, that just doesn't work.

Or more exactly, hiring people whom job is to communicate would have made the campaign way more efficient. Both in terms of traffic and image.

I also advise them using language targeting for their facebook community management.

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But - HEY! - what's up with other cool brands in Berlin's streets?!

Nike has done some nice rough posters. For some reason, we notice them from far far far away.

Its main communication competitor at the moment - Adidas - has endorsed the Urban Artist Series.

Here is how the vernissage at the West Berlin Gallery looked like on Friday. The exhibition will remain in there until the 23th of July.

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Previous update on the same topic (french):

Sur le même sujet: Berlin: Histoire, Culture & Marketing