How Can The Kentucky Derby Festival 2009 Pegasus Pin Provide Pin Marketing Lessons For Your Business?

Each year the Kentucky Derby Festival releases a new batch of custom lapel pins which enables the wearer to have free entry several dozen festival events this spring. I will share 4 great pin marketing lessons you can use when using pins in the promotion of your business services and products.

Marketing Lesson #1: Distribution Using Strategic Alliances

They have lined up with several strategic alliances to distribute their custom pins. Currently there are more than 1,000 commercial Louisville-area outlets that will gladly sell them to you.  Besides earning a percentage on every pin sold, these stores also win because their patrons will buy additional items while picking up their pins.

By purchasing before the event the customer pays only $4 instead of $5 at the gate.  This is a 20% savings and motivates people to buy early sending in a surge of cash flow to the festival before it even begins. Last year they sold upwards of 350,000 pins which paid for 20% of the total events cost!  Talk about smart marketing! How can you incorporate this idea?

Marketing Lesson #2: Packaging Ideas

You can buy the plastic pins for $4.00 each, or… buy a “Family Fun Pack” which gives you all five pins for $15. This is very smart marketing. It gives people an incentive to spend more money with you and increases the amount of profit made on each client. Are the creative juices flowing yet?

Marketing Lesson #3: Using Bonuses

When you buy a pin you also get 2 bonus coupons, one for products or discounted services at a retail outlet and the second for a Churchill Downs’ promotion which gives free admission to the track and discounts on Derby-related gifts. What kind of bonuses could you include?

Marketing Lesson #4: Using A Contest

When you open your sealed pin pack and find a gold pin, you are automatically eligible for one of 15 grand prizes, including a $10,000 vacation package and a 2009 Honda CRV Crossover vehicle. They made it very easy to qualify as 1 in 23 packs contains a gold pin. Now this was very smart to do because it moves people to buy more than one pin. It is almost like a pin lottery!  Have you thought of using a contest like this to drive your pin marketing virally?

Bonus Marketing Lesson #5: “If It Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It”

I know I told you there were 4 lessons but I thought of this one afterward. This is the 37th annual Pegasus Pins event. What does that tell you… it works! Too many people get bored of their marketing efforts and quickly abandon them…EVEN if they are profitable. Don’t fall into this common trap of BOREDOM.

Conclusion:

Don’t get stuck in the pin marketing rut of “hand them out and they will come”. First you need to buy your pins from a real lapel pin manufacturer. Then use these ideas to generate word of mouth, traffic and sales for you and your business partners by using these pin marketing lessons.

Article source

Did you like this article?

Please let us know what you thought about it. How are you marketing using lapel pins?

Related posts:

1. Disney Pins: Marketing Lessons For Your Business
2. Pin Promotions: Are You Utilizing These Ideas?
3. Marketing Your Business With Fund Raising Pins
4. Breast Cancer Pins: What Marketing Lesson Can You Learn From This?
5. Cheap Promotions: Great Idea For Your Business

Tags: 2009-honda-crv, custom-lapel-pins, joint+ventures, joint-ventures, kentucky+derbe, kentucky-derbe-festival, kentucky-derby, lapel-pin-manufacturer, marketing, marketing-ideas, marketing-lessons, marketinglessons, pegasus+pins, pegasus-pins, pin+marketing+lessons, pin-marketing-lessons, promotional+items, promotional+marketing, promotional-items, promotional-marketing, strategic+alliances, strategic-alliances

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Business Ideas, Pin Marketing Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.