How to Get a Mob of Customers to Your Liquor Store
Hold a sale on high-end vodka? Give away free samples of your latest bourbon shipment?
These could work. But for Kansas City’s World of Spirits, the answer is committing revenue to greening the store… really.
Yep, the Carrotmob has come to town… remember them? Started in San Francisco, Carrotmob is an activist organization dedicated to greening business. Rather than using traditional, “stick” tactics (protesting, street theater, etc.), Carrotmob offers a “carrot” to businesses that commit to greening themselves: as they put it, “Carrotmob organizes consumers to make purchases that give financial rewards to those businesses who agree to make socially beneficial choices.” Though the organization is new, they’ve already been quite successful: their first event resulted in about five times the normal revenue for K&D Market on 16th St. in San Francisco.
In Kansas City’s choice, this involved approaching fifteen Midtown businesses with a proposal: “We’ll bring a mob of paying customers, if you commit the highest percentage of revenue to going green.” A bidding war broke out, and World of Spirits won by committing 24% of the revenue from its “mob event” towards making the business more energy efficient. Take a look:
