i scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream
In an interesting development - and more fuel to the 'email-is-broken' lobby - ice cream giants Ben and Jerry's announced to their UK database this week that all email marketing would cease and all customer communications would henceforth take place on the various social platforms, principally Facebook and Twitter.
A decision taken in response to feedback from their customers which indicated they didn't get much value from updates through the email channel.
Aside from the obvious move to communicating via channels that their customers pull in versus those that push, it's clearly a lot more economical for B&J, with dramatic reduction of costs (no email platform to pay for) and far more on-point (only those who want to hear from them will hear from them).
Add to this B&J have also made a foray into the tweeting-truck phenomenon, as popularised by Kogi BBQ in Los Angeles and Fojol Brothers of Washington, the B&J truck having just completed it's tour of duty giving away 50,000 ice creams in New York and set to move on to Boston shortly.
The B&J NYC Scooptruck tweeted it's locations aided by foursquare and also captured photos of happy ice cream beneficiaries which fed into their Flickr stream, tagged with the recipients twitter handle, of course, for extra spreadability measure (because it's all about me, natch).
For added flavour there's the B&J ipone app - Moo Vision - which opens up 3D Augmented Reality animations from the lid design using image recognition rather than a QR code.
A free prize outside rather than inside, if you like.
We watch with interest as again it's testament to the notion that increasingly digital marketing is about fanbase not database.
