Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Creative Ideas

Sometimes the best marketing ideas are relatively simple, and they produce benefits that far outweigh their production cost. First Friday is obviously one of them. After reading all of the creative and thoughtful responses to the "First Friday" post I thought that this might be a good opportunity for all of us to throw out a few of the ideas that have been rattling around in the backs of our head to see if any of them might lead to something worthwhile. The pub crawl (Beer and Loathing is great Coco and D) is a prime example. I have two ideas that I would like to throw out for comments or criticism. The first is January promotion that would run for 3 or 4 weeks. The theme is diner and a movie. The imperial would run a series of old movies on Tuesday nights (think Bogart and Hepburn) and patrons could attend for free if they got a coupon from one of the downtown restaurants or other participating businesses. The businesses could set their criteria fo receiving the coupon, and the next morning the Imperial could redeem the coupons for cash. My other idea is for a major free concert downtown funded in part by some of the larger downtown businesses. Beamies and The Boll Weevil could provide a thousand dollars each, for example, which could be meaningful if a few (20 to 25) other companies would participate at the same level. This would then be the seed money to bring in major sponsors and produce a big time show.