Jon Cooper: Think outside the box to get ahead

Sep 9 2010 By Jon Cooper

I was in Loughborough at the weekend, and witnessed the latest outdoor marketing campaign run by the UK’s largest pizza delivery chain.

Not that anyone would have missed it, because a few dozen kids roaming the streets dressed in 4ft pizza boxes are really quite eye-catching.

A classic example of outside the (pizza) box thinking? Well, almost. Sadly the fantastic PR concept looked set to be undermined by less-than-brilliant execution. Most of the wobble-boarders – for so they are titled – looked rather scruffy and more than a little wobble-bored.

When I saw one of them smoking a fag, and another hoody-wearing colleague spitting onto the pavement (at least it didn’t dribble down his pepperoni), I thought it was time to have a chat with Pizza HQ.

Responding to my account of what I’d seen, they issued the following thin and crusty statement: “When employees are out wobble-boarding, they are representing our company and we expect them to act in an appropriate manner – which does not include smoking. We had 85 wobble-boarders in and around Loughborough this week and we are confident this is an isolated incident.”

Personally, I still think some of them looked a bit deep pan, but the scheme is apparently working brilliantly well, and I was told that sales are rising faster than the dough in their ovens.

Anyway, the whole experience did get me thinking. It’s a great re-hash of the time-honoured sandwich-board, and is really quite cost-effective. After all, you could stand your wobble-person in front of an expensive advert on the side of a bus shelter, obscuring your competitor’s message from view for no more than £5.80 per hour.

I wonder how long it will be before we find our pavements blocked with 6ft-wide wobbly hot-dogs, scarily massive burgers-on-legs and an infinite range of other consumer goods modelled at four times life-size by a whole new class of employees?

Actually, I reckon that crowd in Loughborough missed a trick. If they’d built small battery-powered pizza ovens into the front of the wobble-boards, they could have been handing out free samples, encouraging hungry shoppers to visit the outlet for the real thing. Now that would have been a slice of genius.

*Jon Cooper is a director of www.Sensiblemoney.co.uk