add value through content
Waterstone's the booksellers have just about got it spot on with this 'What's Your Story' campaign.
To celebrate the National UK Reading Year they are challenging budding writers to compose a short story and submit it to the Wys site.
The best entries are being published in an online gallery and in stores - alongside a collection of specially commisioned stories written by some top authors.
3 winning stories will be published in a postcard book alonside the 'real' authors including Doris Lessing, Michael Rosen, Nick Hornby, Sebastian Faulks, Lauren Child, Tom Stoppard and Irvine Welsh and of course...
JK Rowling, who has supplied an exclusive 800-word, hand-written prequel to the Harry Potter series.
Value, content, participation, community, partnership, branding.
I've been debating with a few twitter buddies whether the likes of Amazon have the same ability to generate that fuzzy feeling around their brand as the likes of Waterstones.
In the book market I will always prefer to shop with Waterstones if I can rather than Amazon. Why? Because of stuff like this. The cold aggregation of the likes of Amazon doesn't tickle me.
OK there's the long tail and the user reviews, the super fast service etc- but I find something more re-assuring about a brand that actually 'cares' about it's product.
Half of the staff are authors.
And actively working for good in the community - Neil Perkin talks about this here - kind of inspired this post.
Plus they are British...
The campaign and microsite was developed by Manchester digital agency Code Computerlove
5 comments:
Thanks for the kind words - we're all very excited about the way things are going. But while Code did a bang up job building the microsite, the actual campaign is a Waterstone's creation - all our own ideas!
thanks Jon. Good luck and hopefully theres more good stuff to come.
Funnily enough, I was involved in the Waterstones pitch a little while back - so it's nice to see the brand essence being lived.
Nice one WaterstonesJon & the team..
will, what happened with the pitch?
Good concept this. Some interesting things happening with publishing right now. Lots of collaborative projects, authors putting their books online, new marketing models etc etc. Kind of like the Penguin 'We Tell Stories' which I also like (a lot)
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