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Dominos Edible Box – April Fools Day 2014
Many companies struggle with how to make their somewhat boring business get passed around social media. Let’s face it, tax preparers are not usually Facebook sensations.
But April 1st is one day that they can be.
Let’s look at some April Fools marketing ideas for your business. We’ll talk about a few general guidelines and then 10 specific examples and ideas to make your April Fools Day hoax a hit. If the list below isn’t enough for you, check out Hoaxes.org. (Yes, there is an entire database of April Fools Day hoaxes.)
General Guidelines
- Hit Your Market – If you are a local company, consider anchoring your hoax to a local landmark or recent news item.
- Tie In Your Product Or Service – Name recognition in your market is good and that may be all you get from your hoax, but for added marketing value, tie in your product or service.
- Get The Right People Involved – If you have an office prankster, enlist that person to generate ideas and get a couple of marketing-minded folks to refine it and make sure everyone agrees that it’s going to be a hit.
10 Ideas For Your Company’s April Fool’s Day Hoax
- Un-innovation – Take your industry back a decade or two. Un-innovation can be quite amusing. Check out Conan Obrien on the Future of Twitter.
- Give People What They Hate – Design-minded folk love to make fun of the Comic Sans font. Google took that font and ran with it, introducing the “Comic Sans for Everyone” extension in 2011.
- Advertise A Ridiculous Job Opening – If you are clever, you can find a way to tie the job opening to a product feature you want to show off. Check out how Google offered to hire “autocompleters”, again in 2011.
- Reinforce Your Company Stereotype – The Virgin group’s high-profile founder Sir Richard Branson is known for making media splashes with crazy stunts. It was almost believable when the company announced that he had bought Pluto and reinstated it as a planet. Of course, this also played into Virgin Galactic’s marketing as they continued to commercialize space travel.
- Talk Politics – You’ve probably heard that it’s good to steer clear of politics as a company. April 1st could be an exception. BMW didn’t align themselves with a party, but did give their customers a chance to do so with a customized tag in 2010.
- 1-Up A Competitor’s Hoax – Hotels.com offered rooms on the moon in 2009. Competitor Expedia.com bettered their competitor by offering rooms on Mars.
- Photoshop Phun. OK, this illustration is not business-related, but you can use your imagination to apply it to your business. The picture below is my family Christmas picture from last year. These things can get passed around social media quite a lot. How about your company president in a dangerous situation, your product morphed into something disgusting, your building with a giant spider crawling up the wall.
- Bring Back A Villain – We wouldn’t advise going too villainous, but a somewhat more harmless villain might work. NPR announced that Richard Nixon would be entering the presidential race of 1992.
- Serve The Lefties – Burger King claimed they were making adjustments to the Whopper to make it more left-hand friendly. If you are a dentist, why not advertise that you are getting new state-of-the-art dentist chairs for left-handed patients? Here’s a whole list of fake left-handed products.
- Go Big And Small – Take your product or service and make it ridiculously big or small. Starbucks claimed they were making both tiny and monstrous cup sizes in this April Fools Day prank. Insurance Company? Offer to insure car keys.
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Once you come up with the perfect idea, you need to put a plan in place for how to spread the word. It could be a social media post, email campaign, blog post, or full blown paid media advertisement.
If you pull off a great April Fool’s Day Hoax, let us know how it went in the comments.
Oh, and stop back by on April 1. There’s a good chance something will be a little off here at ITD Interactive.