It was 12:59 am and I was fully awake. All I had in front of me was the blank laptop screen and a table full of scrap paper with various ideas and notes written on them….
I have to admit, it was unusual that my table was this messy. I mean, yeah, I always have to drink lots of coffee to keep me alive, too much caffeine would make anyone a little nausea, rather than feeling inspirational. I had to agree that I was totally run out of ideas and had nothing else in me to give. That is where this story comes from.
Everything dated back to last month when my boss had a “special” meeting with me. At first glance, I thought it was a meeting to talk about all my hard works and so forth. In fact, it wasn’t. The idea behind the meeting was very simple. Just like what every boss wants, he wanted to push up the sit standing desk sales which is never really a bad idea. Of course! I mean, who doesn’t?
When I heard this from my boss, my heart began pumping. I felt a little bit excitement from my tiny little heart, with a little breath in my lungs, I just simply accepted the challenge with my bitter smile, I was completely spaced out at the moment, probably lack of sleep, or maybe a little bit hangover. I didn’t really know what I had accepted though back to the time, the only thing that I remembered is when I was keep nodding and nothing else, I suddenly felt like a tragic hero, the hero is about to sacrifice his life, the hero that doesn’t know where he is belong to and the hero…..”what about let’s make the goal to increase the sit stand desk sales revenue triple by the end of Nov ?” My boss asked politely, it made me came back from the reality, and yeah, this time is going to be our legendary “sit standing desk” AKA model MT101 & ET101 series. “Damn, you must not be kidding” I murmured.This was the time where I couldn’t feel my balls anymore. Yeah, it was THAT serious!
So, after I received this challenge, I started to implement resources into all the channels we had. I made sure that the marketing budget I had was sufficient, the organic content that we had was helpful for our customers, and that the sit standing desk price that we had was Canada’s lowest guaranteed. For the month of October, the sale units increased way more than the average. I can’t name all the great records that we hit during the month of October. Despite the massive success, it still was not enough for the triple sales goal that my boss assigned. You know, that is why it’s called “triple”. Because ONLY the sky is our limit, nope, my limit actually.
Needless to say, November has finally arrived and thus so does my task due day. I felt like the countdown bell has finally come to an end, and since most of the campaign budget was relocated to Black Friday SALE / Cyber Monday related campaigns, I did not really have much budget left. As you can see, this was pretty much a last minute call. I had nothing to do but to use my brain power and come up with a solid plan to bring sales that could impress literally EVERYONE.
Oops, I meant if my plan succeeds… OR, I don’t know what’s coming after! After hours of contemplating, with lots of caffeine flowing in my body and lots of diagrams plus even my own impressive hand-made drawing, I finally come out with the conclusion for what our sit standing desk campaign should look like! It must be:
1) Zero budget or nearly zero since I do not have much left.
2) Super simple and easy to execute, most of my colleagues went on vacations.
3) The campaign has to be special!
4) This campaign will be awesome!
I am so impressed that it took hours of my time to come out with such a BRILLIANT conclusion.
Pro tips for marketers: If you are completely out of ideas and you are really desperated, it’s better for you to either take a BIG nap or dump, because let’s face it – most of our great ideas come from the toilet.
Without hesitation, I came up with a few hashtags & concepts for this campaign. Now the problem lay on which name should I choose? This was rather a tough question, so I brought my idea paper to my cat and let my cute kitties to choose. Why – because it’s authentic and non-biased.
You will be always be surprised by how the little furs impress you in life! How did I do it – just simply talked to my kitties and asked him if he / she if they like the idea. You can do this yourself. If your cat answers “meow”, then it should be work. That’s my rule. On the other hand, if you ask and the cat scratches you or they walk away, then it means they probably hate the idea so you might want to do away with it. For this campaign I had to spend like an hour talking to cats like an idiot in the middle of night when everyone was sleeping. That said though, I have tried this method a couple of times in the past and it’s always been successful. So this has become my life saver!
After a quick decision making process with my cats’ amazing assistance (and scratching of course), I chose the campaign name as “#SitStandDeskChallenge”. To me, this is very straight-forward. At the same time, it’s highly correlated to the topic that we are promoting, which is a healthier and ergonomic way to “sit less & stand more” (click here for our animated video) in your office environment.
The idea here is to make this campaign as raw as possible, without any useless, artificial or deceptive contents like other marketing companies may do. We don’t agree with those practices so our idea is very simple. In every hour and half, we send out notifications to stand up, or to sit down, or any of the other things you may hear in the office. This is a campaign meant to be fun and with positive intent to raise awareness of the benefits of sit-stand working!
Note: We had also tried the KONAMI code to play with this sit stand desk, which is ↑↑↓↓←→←→BA. In this process, our product specialist ran to me and just wanted me to stop it. I had no choice but to cancel this plan. (What a shame)
I believe that with this repetitive notification plan that we push on social media platforms, people will start to realize that we can shift from the traditional idea to a new modern ergonomic way of working. Today, this is how an office should work. At the same time, people can bring office fun talk into their work place. Working does not require a person to be rigid. In fact, a healthier posture during long hours of work will enhance productivity & creativity!
An example like this:
Or this:
Even this ?????
To straighten the idea a bit, we even thought about creating an “achievement” unlock. For example, once you stand for a certain amount of hours. I guess we will be starting with the purpose of informing customer in a more informal and humorous matter. Let’s say if this concept works, then more fun & rewards can be introduced in the future. If this doesn’t work, I will admit fact for being a marketing loser and go home to cry. LOL.
Will we achieve this #SitStandDeskChallenge?
I do not know. The only thing I can assure you is, there might be the chance that your boss will purchase some good quality ergonomic sit standing desks.
How to participate with us
The task is very simple. Just share this blog and stay tuned to our Twitter about the #SitStandDeskChallenge. Every 30 minutes between 9 am and 5 pm, we will randomly inform our followers that it’s the time to stand up or sit down depend on sitaution. No pressure. This is just for your reference! (Too bad if your company does not allow you to stand up. Which really sucks.) If you like my sense of humor or you like this article (I hope so), please help me to share this on reddit, facebook, twitter or any social that you can think about it!
Feel free to share our post with the #SitStandDeskChallenge hashtag. You can share it with your friends, family, boss, boss’s wife or your purchasing manager. We are currently running a sit-stand desk giveaway event on our Facebook page. Feel free to stop by!
UPDATE:
Just received a comment from my colleague that he said this blog sucked, I guess I better go home and cry before the Black Friday & Cyber Monday arrive! Will keep you posted.
Best,