What’s the best communication tool to promote your small business?

A website?  Rich banners?  A blog?  How about chalk…

It’s not very often that you come across a business bursting with personality.

Every day on my way to work I walk past The Scandinavian Kitchen, a café specialising in awesomeness (awesomeness is Swedish for meatball)…. Not really, but every day they make me smile with their cheeky / witty chalk board messages.

“Herring a good day”

“We don’t sell Swedes, but some of us are”

“Take 3 topless Scandanavians to the park”

“Smorgasbording is not a sport”

Established by partners Jonas (a Swede) and Bronte (a Dane) two and a half year ago (one day before their first child was born!) this is a café to pay attention to.

Matt [@HirsuteGent] and I paid Jonas a visit today to chat about the business, chalk boards, and hugs…

On the chalk board

Lots of small cafés in the area keep a chalk board outside to attract customers – Reynolds, Bagel Mania, to name a few.  But none of them talk about topless sandwiches.

Jonas sees the board as setting the tone for business: friendly, warm, cheeky and fun.  Indeed, the culture is more like a pub, but friendlier and with coffee, breakfast and lunch instead of beer, vodka, nuts and drunk, loud men…

Essentially the chalk board breaks down any barriers to entry.  The first time I saw it, it me want to go inside and hang out.  It didn’t even matter what they were selling, I just liked the tone of voice.

On food

That said, “We can’t just be friendly and feed you shit,” says Jonas.

True that.

Yes, they have a quirky personality, but the quality needs to be there, too.  In addition to selling the famously delicious  Monmouth coffee, they offer a range of soups, sandwiches, cakes and pastries.  They’ve also got loads of grocery products from Scandinavia (for anyone jonesing for some brunost).  Most of the products are Swedish (because there are more Swedes living in London than Danes or Norwegians) but they’ve also got food from Denmark and Norway.  My go-to is a little chocolate called Plop, for obvious reasons…

On hugs

Scandi Kitchen’s loyalty program is also friendlier than the competition.  After 5 coffee stamps you’re rewarded with a hug.  After 10 you get a free coffee.  I lucked out today and was treated to a Scandi sandwich…

Being in Britain, though, some customers do take a pass, but they’re missing out.  To date, Jonas claims they’ve given out 5.5 million hugs.  That’s a lot of love!

Online

Finally, Scandi Kitchen’s online presence spans a website, blog and Facebook Page (with 995 members).

The site extends the same cheeky “chalk board humour”:

“We let the Finns in on this one, even if most of them technically don’t consider themselves Scandinavians; we figured they might want to pop in at some stage to discuss ice hockey, Eurovision Song Contest and skiing”.

Jonas sees the blog as an extension of the chalk board, where people can visit and get a taste of Scandi’s fun personality and what they’ve got going on.

Remaining on brand, posts often focus on Scandinavian happenings, such as the way new is reported in Denmark:

As well as non-Scandi related content, like ads that feature people who look like they’re …

The Scandinavian Kitchen is located at 61 Great Titchfield Street in London.  If you’re in the area, do  yourself a stop by for a coffee and a hug.

Last night, Ben, Resh and I went to the launch party for The Cube Store, Nissan’s multimedia design exhibition celebrating their new model, The Cube.

The event was held at Boiler House in Brick Lane and featured live street-art battles, beat boxing and some very funky cube-inspired designs.  We may have also had a glass of champagne or two…!

The design of the space itself is cube-tastic.  Inside a dome is a wall-to-wall multimedia video experience that features fast-paced city and product shots.  Very cool.  The street art took place on either side of giant stacks of red cubes, which comprises the central design.  Despite being a launch for a car, the Cube was presented as design, alongside design.   This sets it apart from most other automobile launches, where the car is the star and everything revolves around it.

Cubelist club cards were distributed to attendees, each with their own individual shapes and colours, driving to cubelist.com.  There you’re asked to match the colours to your card to unlock your membership – a creative way to encourage sign ups.  The members section includes a design-inspired webzine, discounts at The Cube Store and access to exclusive Cube events.

My favourite section on the page, surprisingly, is the Build Your Cube section, which is an interactive experience that has you customize your Cube in separate sections, which you “drive” around the environment.

Once you’re happy with your design (complete with funky dashboard mats), you can “take your Cube for a spin,” where your car follows your mouse through a series of paint splotches in an interactive visualisation.

When you navigate to the Cube section on the Nissan page you’re presented with the tagline, “It’s an unusual club that isn’t for everyone, but if you’re not everyone…” Clearly Nissan is targeting people who like to be different and try to build a community around the car’s unusual design, much like VW’s famous Lemon angle, or Mini’s cult following.

If you don’t have a Cubelist card, you’ve got to apply for one by completing a 24-question profile test.  This illustrates the mystery and intrigue they’re trying to build around the car.  Only once Nissan “gets to know you better” and you pass the test will you be invited to join this community… And not everybody will be.

The Cube Store opens to the public today, November 26^th and will run until January 3^rd.  The pop-up shop was created in collaboration with Parisian design emporium, Colette, and will feature a range of Japanese inspired lifestyle products from renowned international designers.  The Nissan Cube will be displayed alongside a series of music, fashion and creative experiences throughout the seven week stint.

Check it out if you’re in the area!

Facebook’s Flavour of the Day

Ahhh, the Facebook app.  So many brands try to do these, but so few do it well.

Without access to Facebook’s statistics, I believe that Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice has been one of the most successful apps on the platform – at least in terms of buzz.  It encouraged Facebook users to ‘sacrifice’ (delete) 10 of their friends in exchange for a Whopper voucher, and as consequence generated tons of press and dare I say ruined quite a few friendships. Facebook actually shut down this app due to claims that it violated privacy settings (users are not supposed to be notified when their status as a friend has been ‘revoked’). At the time of its termination, the app saw almost 234,000 friends sacrificed for The King.

Vitamin Water’s latest Flavour Creator Application is another example of a brand who has managed to leverage the crowd sourcing function of social media to engage with consumers in a fun way. The page itself boasts 912, 144 fans at the time of this post, as well as very high interaction rates on their wall postings.

The application encourages users to submit a new flavour and vitamin combination, as well as package design, with a $5,000 incentive to the winner.  Other brands have turned to the masses to influence their product lines – the Walkers Do Us A Flavour activity was highly integrated and successful campaign, as well as Revels Eviction, which asked fans to ‘save the one you love, evict the one you hate’.

The Vitamin Water application uses a ‘buzzmeter’ – an aggregation of Twitter, Foodgawker, Google and Flickr feeds – to determine which flavour is being spoken about the most.  From there it determines the 10 most popular flavours and submits them to the ‘Vitamin Water Judges’ (including Carrie Underwood and 50 Cent) to select the winning combination.  This is pretty safe, since the final decision ultimately rests with Vitamin Water’s panel of judges, but is crowd sourcing, nonetheless.

A series of basic old school-themed games are supposed to determine which vitamins you most need and want in the new flavour.  However there’s nothing particularly telling about actual vitamin content needed in the games, despite their simple and somewhat addictive game play.  Perhaps some example of vitamins and their benefits would add to the app’s function and provide a bit of education.

My favourite part of this application, apart from the smooth integration of RSS, gaming, and crowd sourcing, is the cheeky tone of voice, which permeates the Flavour Creator.  The application’s copy is consistently humorous and demonstrates a good understanding of their target audience.

The initial dialogue when you launch the app is, “Hope it’s ok we pulled you away from checking out you ex’s photo gallery… so get cracking, you can always be a stalker later…” This illustrates Vitamin Water’s understanding of both the medium they’re using and how their audience interact with this media (come on, you’ve all done your share of Facebook stalking).

While this isn’t a revolutionary concept by any means (indeed, nothing here is new – RSS feeds, voting, gaming), Vitamin Water has integrated these elements nicely in a fine example of how to engage with your audience by speaking their language and encouraging a dialogue.  The $5,000 incentive can’t hurt either…

I vote for a lime/banana/mint combination with Echinacea vitamin powers … who’s with me…?!?

Our quirky campaign for Weetabix Minis has just gone live.

The TV spot by WCRS tracks the world-weary MD of the Minis Factory as he herds a tour group around its shrunken workspace, and culminates in an employee – Nigel – being ‘minimised’.

The digital experience – aimed at 6-10 year old kids – begins where the TV ad finishes, and requires users to go on journey of discovery around the diminutive factory, with plenty of quirky fun along the way.

The factory is shown in cross-section, like an ant farm, and users interact with gadgets shown in the ad such as the ‘Chocolator’, Shrunken Employee Detector and Minimiser in their effort to Find Nigel.

Acrossair is one of the first augmented reality applications to go live on the iPhone AppStore. Using the phone’s video function, the application shows Londoners where the nearest tube stations are in relation to their location. The app tells you how far away (in kilometers) you are from the station, as well as what lines operate out of the station.

Click here to see the app in action.

This is an excellent example of adding utility to augmented reality (AR). Although AR has been around for over a year it has recently become very popular in marketing communications for a number of brands. The danger of such popular technologies is ‘bandwagoning,’ where marketers create applications which serve no real purpose other than to appear current.

A simple yet very addicting ad from Pringles! This ad received tons of great press and won a gold Cyber Lions award at Cannes this summer. The ad reveals a humorous story with each (seemingly endless) click and doesn’t even navigate to the Pringles site.

Click here to give it a go.

Very nice brand reminder – we’re going to go buy some Pringles now…

This is a great execution from Amnesty International in Hamburg, Germany, calling attention to the problem of domestic abuse. The billboard features a picture of a happy couple standing together with the caption, “It happens when nobody is watching”. When the observer looks away the image changes to the man abusing his partner.

The billboard works by scanning its proximity with an eye-tracking camera, which triggers an image switch on the display panel when it senses someone looking at it. The change only occurs after a brief delay, so that observers understand what’s going on, and get the message.

This received a lot of press and consumer interaction and is a fantastic way of calling attention to and illustrating a difficult concept.

What other propositions could be applied using this technology?

Read more here.

The third phase in our Start Thinking Soldier campaign for the Army has launched,  focusing on the theme of Leadership.

This Mission differs from the other three in that it’s set in Africa, with the user dilemma spawning from civilians rather than possible insurgents.

The interactive challenges put you in the boots of the base commander, assessing and deploying troops after a natural disaster, as well as a Battlefield ambulance driver and Lynx helicopter crew member, guiding Rigid Raiders over floodland below you.

Experience Mission 3

Check out this video, If David Lynch Directed Dirty Dancing.
The original film was great, but we want to see this one!

We’re Kit Kat’s UK digital agency and this month we updated our successful ‘Perfect Break’ website and Facebook page to incorporate the brand’s new ‘Fashion Break’ promotion.

The Kit Kat Senses ‘Fashion Break’ promotion launched in May and will run until July.

»Check out the website
»View the Facebook page