I love Asian foods of all kinds. Japanese is probably my favourite, but I’m partial to Vietnamese and what Aussie doesn’t love Thai food. I don’t mind authentic Chinese food but I’m not a big fan of the Australian-Chinese versions. Near my work there is Malaysian and Indonesian and Korean food but last week I felt like a burger. Grill’d sucked me in with their “Healthy Burgers, Made with Love” and I succumbed. And I’m so glad that I did because I discovered their “Local Matters” initiative.
Looks inviting, doesn’t it? How could i resist?
Business Supporting Local Non Profit Organisations
As many of my readers know, I am heavily invested in the not for profit sector. I work for non profit organisations, teaching them how to use digital marketing and digital fundraising effectively, and I participate in events and campaigns and give to charity causes. While many of my clients are global and national not for profit organisations, I offer my services pro bono to organisations who fit my personal values and the things I care about. This is what Grill’d are doing with their Local Matter initiative (< click here to watch the video).
Grill’d Burgers allow each store to support not for profit organisations in their local area – and the customers get to choose who gets the money.
Effectively, the Grill’d Local Matters initiative is crowdsourcing in an analogue world. The customer chooses which local charity will get the money at the end of each month. They could extend this initiative even further if they made it digital as well. They could allow people to vote via their mobile while they’re in store. Check in’s via Facebook and Google and FourSquare could get an additional vote. Grill’d could allow the local charities to promote their organisation and the Local Matters initiative throughout the community and drive more people to vote – in store, via social media, via the Grill’d website.
Local Marketing or Location Based Marketing
Last week at a Marketing event, a young man by the name of Daniel Dewar dropped a statistic that most people only ever have 3 primary locations that they visit at any given time in their lives. It might be work, home and the gym or work, home and your Mum’s house, or your girlfriend’s house or the beach if you’re a surfer. So these two random events in my life – eating lunch at a Grill’d burger place and going to a marketing seminar, that both actually happened within a radius of about 100 metres of my office, got me thinking about local marketing.
Local marketing is usually used to drive traffic into bricks and mortar stores. We use our mobile devices often to find locations near to where we are currently located – places to eat, public toilets, music venues, train stations. There are whole agencies and business models now built around SoLoMo. And while I agree that these three marketing channels and destinations compliment one another, I think its more about the story or the action that a brand is trying to drive than just about combining these elements.
Good Local Marketing Should Tap Into My Sense of Community
It’s about feeling attached to something, it’s about a personal connection we have with the places that we live and work. We care about the person that we buy our coffee from every day. We like to walk down the street and receive a smile or a “hey” and a nod or a “good morning” from people that we recognise, but don’t necessarily know their name. Local marketing should tap into our sense of community. The mobile web is brilliant for helping us locate things quickly, find our way to a place we’re unfamiliar with and discover new places to eat, drink and be entertained. But I have no emotional connection to these things – it’s a task based activity. The mobile web is facilitating a need that I have, its a utility that aids me in getting from point A to point B. Whereas local marketing should be about engaging with me and making me want to be involved, not just attend.
And that’s what the Grill’d Local Matters campaign did for me. It made me take a minute out of my hectic schedule to read the stories of these local charities and consider which of them represented my values. It made me talk to the staff about it and pick up a flyer to read more. The campaign engaged my sense of community and my desire to contribute to something bigger than myself. It caused me to tell my friends about it and to write this blog. All up, my Grill’d Burgers experience has expanded from 5 minutes waiting in store for my order to about 2 hours of engagement. Would you say that their local marketing has been a success?
Grill’d are trying to share the love around but the manager at the Crown St, Surry Hills (Sydney) store said that they struggle to find enough charities in the area to get involved. So if you want to raise the profile of your organisation with people in your area, get down to your local Grill’d store and apply to be part of the Local Matters initiative.