Fun, weird, wild and wacky marketing ideas

[Kurt]

I don't recall all of the specifics as I read about this strategy for piggybacking on a competitor's advertising many years ago.

The most popular furniture store on a high traffic street in a large city was running a lot of TV spots.  A competing store was located a few streets over from the popular store. The competing store spotted a high visibility building wall on the way to and near the popular store. The competing store paid the building owner for the rights to paint advertising with a competing message for their own store on the side of the building. Everyone driving to the popular store couldn't help but see the advertising (with an arrow indicating where to turn) for the competing store. The competing store was able to piggyback on the popular store's TV spots and successfully divert traffic to their own store.

In Denver in the 80s there was a mom and pop furniture store that opened. They put it right between the two biggest furniture stores in Colorado and ran a bunch of the worst, low budget TV ads you can imagine. The commercials were so bad they became a local joke.

But they were very successful as there main strategy was to capture the people traveling between the two big stores. You often hear to stay away from competition when often the exact opposite is best. If you want to open a small burger joint, do it next to a McDonalds.

BTW the couple became someone famous in Denver and were in the public a lot. There were totally dysfunctional as a couple (and as people) and went out of business....but it wasn't because their marketing concept wasn't a good one, which is go where your customers are.