How we sent out boxes with 2 pounds of sand and empty bottles

Imagine that you do something you really believe in, and what’s more, it works great. You want to share that with people who could have much easier working lives thanks to that, but who know neither you nor your product. How to get them interested at the very first moment, so that your offer wouldn’t get lost in the piles of daily mail? How about sending something, which would stick out of the piles?  

We are a small company from the Czech Republic and we developed a product, which can make managers’ everyday lives significantly easier. It’s called TeamGuru and some large corporations use it successfully for strategic and operative management. We wanted to approach other large companies, mainly in the United States.

It was not difficult to get the addresses of the top managers’ offices. The challenge was to get them think about the possibility to manage their teams more effectively – with TeamGuru, of course. So we focused on a human characteristic, which never fails. Not even in skilled top managers. That is CURIOSITY.

We decided to send them simply an empty bottle. Actually, an almost empty bottle. There’s just a little message in it. A message in a bottle is the type of mail, which is so hard to resist. Would you be able to throw such a mailing into a garbage bin without opening it? So we were thinking about how the whole package should look like.

We tried out bottles and boxes of different shapes and sizes, but none of them were the right thing. There was still something missing. We had an idea about what would be the best scenario – if the addressee in question had to pull the bottle right out of sand. Well…why not? 

We put a bottle into a paper box with ocean images and tropical island print that merges with real sand inside the box where the bottle with the message is buried. It’s the Kinetic Sand, so the addressees won’t pour a pound of regular sand into their keyboards after opening the package and, at the same time, their kids get an amusing toy. In fact, they themselves can play around with it as well, because if they start using TeamGuru, they’ll have plenty of time to do so. But above all, the whole thing just looks great. 

There’s only a simple question on a strip of paper inside the bottle:  Are you a great leader? with a link to www.surei.am. We had to communicate with Armenia for some time because of that domain. Nevertheless it was worth it, and currently that website brings the inquisitive managers to a tropical island, where they can play a short video presenting our product with the option to try it for free. We believe in our product, so we think that if the right person comes to the website and watches the video, there is a great chance he/she’ll want to try it.

To sum it up, we simply sent out a great direct mailing (something over two pounds with the sand) with a message leaving an imprint...hopefully not only in the sand. You might consider that as an expensive piece of fun, but a direct mailing that would end up in a bin would be much more expensive. However, we’ll see. Perhaps a manager somewhere in Houston or New York has just dug a bottle out of sand and is shaking our message out of it.

We’ll find out soon whether he replies to it. We’ll keep you posted!