Campus Marketing - Talk is good, but don’t forget the chalk

I have been looking for the best ways to market to the Gen Y demographic for the past three years. We’ve tried everything from handing out fliers to getting newspaper articles written about us. Interestingly enough the most effective form of advertising has been the cheapest thing we’ve done - Chalking.

Chalking is when me, my partner, and our interns go out between midnight and 2 am and use colored chalk to write SloopyMenus.com all over the sidewalks in the most populated areas of campus. Every time that we do this, we see our traffic stats rise; the effect is immediate and measurable.

Why does it work? If you ever go to a college campus, especially a campus with 50,000 students, you will notice the majority of the people are walking around with headphones on, looking at their feet. They are either mentally preparing for an exam, or they are wishing they didn’t have to go to class. Either way, they are looking down, and they are thinking.

We conducted a focus group last year, and asked the students how they heard about our website. The common answer was that it was written on the sidewalks in the oval (the center of campus). We asked them what made them go to the site because we knew that there was really no call to action. They replied that they went either out of curiosity, or because they asked one of their friends about it while walking, and they told them what it was.

Think about large companies, and if they did something like this on college campuses across the nation. For instance, if a new “jobs” website is launching, and they’re targeting the college demographic, they could pay two kids at schools across the country $20 a piece to go out and chalk. This could reach millions of educated Millennials about to enter the job market.

Obviously, this would not be a first for companies to market on campus. An article from the Boston Globe discusses companies like Microsoft, JetBlue, The Cartoon Network, and Victoria’s Secret using students to “pitch their peers”. The chalking approach is different in the fact that there are no personal sales, but if it is a buzz you are looking to create, the chalking will do the trick.

I’m going to do an experiment this spring. I am going to go out one night, and write my name on sidewalks all over campus. Thousands of people will go out and see “Dan Healy” and wonder who or what that is. Then I’ll go out to some bars that weekend and introduce myself to as many people as possible. I will keep track of how many people can swear that they know my name somehow, and how many random facebookings I receive. I’ll keep you updated.