Geocaching - Combining Adventure and social media for Brand Promotions Part 2/2

Geocaching promotions mentioned in first part of the post are not only limited to big brands, many small business owners have also decided to join in on the fun and create geocaches within their business. For instance while looking for Geocaches you may stumble across one in a local bar. You ask the bartender for the secret container and he will pull out the geocache for you to look at and exchange items. This gets you to their bar and once you are there food and drinks follow. 

Placing a Geocache in your business is a great way to attract new customers especially for businesses like restaurants, book stores and other retail locations since you generally have geocachers with special interests in the items or general vacationers tracing specific geocaches. It gets customers in the door and from there it’s up to you to convert them. It’s a great way to get people into your business with zero marketing costs.

Geocaching is a great opportunity for the tourism industry as many geocachers make geocaching part of their vacation plans; some may even design their own vacation around tracking and retrieving hidden treasures. Many travel agents and vacation resorts have started designing small geocaching campaigns or maintain special geocaches at their hotels. There is an excellent opportunity for developing local business around geocaching. Local cafes can maintain exclusive merchandise from a particular tourist destination and follow up with related services like tourist guides, sightseeing etc.

Indian state owned tourism development corporations can also take a cue from geocaching to promote local tourism. Geocaching program can be designed to promote heritage sites and eco conservation programs. It can also be used to educate the global community about the India’s natural and cultural heritage and promote conservation efforts globally. Such activities especially appeal to young travellers and can be used to develop adventure tourism.        

                                              

Geocaching is essentially a high involvement and challenging activity which coupled with digital media and technology creates a great opportunity for Co-Branding and marketing initiatives at minimal costs. With the ever growing community of geocachers and ease of setting up and tracking such promotions geocaching is an interesting proposition for marketers worldwide.  

Geocaching is still to establish itself in India, but there are quite a few geocaches available like the one at Sanjay Gandhi National park in Mumbai, Lavasa Hill City near Pune, Taj Mahal in Agra and at the Kumbhalgarh Fort. Do you want to be the first one to locate and retrieve these treasures? Join the community at http://www.geocaching.com/

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Geocaching - Combining Adventure and social media for Brand Promotions Part 1/2

Social Media engagement programs often use games or contests to promote new products or to increase brand recall within its target audience. However, with brands increasingly targeting the same group of customers with frequent and undifferentiated social marketing programs, both the quality of engagement and the affiliation towards a brand is decreasing. Moreover, such campaigns can be easily manipulated and with SEO already ensuring selective targeting, marketers may not be able to gauge the market sentiment comprehensibly. 

Techies and Social Media junkies pulling all nighters playing games or chatting in front of flat screen monitors, while being bombarded with advertisements don’t really conjure an image of a real brand building exercise. 

Enter Geocaching. 

Geocaching is a global adventure treasure hunt that combines outdoors, technology and digital media. Geocachers navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates using their GPS-enabled devices to find a geocache (container) hidden at that location. Once you find the Geocache you write in a log book saying “I was here” and exchange a small toy or trinket (give one take one). Currently there are more than 6 million geocachers globally tracking more than 2 millions geocaches. 

Anyone can a make their own geocaching account at http://www.geocaching.com, download their tracking app and start searching for geocaches near your location or by size and difficulty. 

This is a huge potential opportunity for marketers to create a highly engaging promotion campaign for their brands at virtually zero costs as geocachers create and propagate the challenge themselves. Companies can create their own geocaches which contain their merchandise and ask geocachers to enter their experiences in a log book. The hunt will involve passionate people who can then be asked to post images and experiences to create a buzz about their brand. 

In one such brand building exercise geocaching.com created a customized, digital, all-inclusive marketing program for DoubleDay, publishers of John Grisham, to promote his new book ‘The Racketeer’. The challenge required participants to keep 5000 golden John Grisham Geocoins moving across US. When one participant finds a geocoin he moves it to another location. The participants were asked to upload photographs of their geocoins and eleven best photographs won personally Autographed exclusive copies of the book and a real gold coin. DoubleDay gained 72,000 new real Facebook fans and increased their reach by 220% in just a couple of months! 

In another similar and ongoing challenge by Jeep’s Travel Bugs campaign, geocachers are moving miniature Rock Crystal Pearl Jeep Commander models across US. The company placed approximately 8,000 Jeep Travel Bugs in caches across different terrains. Geocachers locate and move the Jeep travel Bug to its next destination. The current locations of some of these geocaches can be tracked at http://jeep.geocaching.com/track/history.aspx. Geocachers are asked to upload creative photographs of these models to their website and Jeep uses these for its branding program and to keep the challenge alive. 

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