Details
Obstacle: McDonalds was Crest Uniform’s largest customer. For 26 years Crest was McDonald’s primary uniform supplier, with an 80% share of the market. McDonalds, as a company, was going through some major reconstruction and had expressed interest in trying out new vendors for uniforms. At McDonald’s primary tradeshow, they were launching a program called QSC (Quality, Service, Cleanliness) and specified all their vendors must support this initiative at the event. Word in the uniform industry was that one of Crest’s competitors had invested an enormous amount of money on a life-sized tradeshow booth display recreating the new McDonald’s countertop and menu board to showcase the new uniform designs in that environment. Unfortunately, Crest had already used most of its marketing budget for the tradeshow and other collateral.
Solution: We knew our customer. McDonald’s managers attended the Worldwide Trade Show to have fun and, as a whole, they loved free gifts. We devised an attraction that would be entertaining - a burger flip game. At the trade show, we encouraged the participants to try to flip rubber burgers from a makeshift grill, printed on Cintra board, into three cut-out holes for prizes. Each hole was labelled with McDonald’s initiatives. The grand prize, if you got a burger in all 3 holes, was a fun, graphic screen-printed t-shirt that read, “I flipped for Crest Uniform!”
Result: The line for the Crest booth was, at a minimum, 30 people deep, all day, each of the four days running. By comparison, traffic at our competitor’s booth was sparce. The last thing these managers wanted was to be in a McDonald’s environment, and that’s exactly what our competitor created. Crest won the most creative booth award from McDonald’s corporate. The total cost of the burger-flips game came in under $500.00.