Trash or Treasure: The Blu Dot Marketing Stunt

This week's Consumed column in the New York Times Magazine features a fun marketing stunt. I'm not usually a fan of marketing or PR stunts -- I think they backfire more often than they hit and they often reek of desperation.

But this one is fun -- on brand, simple, social. Blu Dot, a maker of modern furniture, put some of its chairs out on the streets of New York City with a GPS attached. When people picked up the chairs and took them home, Blu Dot's marketing agency reached out for an interview. Almost everyone who got a chair participated in the interviews. This lead the writer to conclude "As for the potential negative reaction to this marketing as street theater, there doesn’t seem to have been much. Maybe there’s a parallel to the way most Americans are said to loathe Congress in general but keep re-electing their own representatives: Marketing is an awful intrusion, unless we’re totally into the chair (or whatever) being marketed."

Indeed.