"Every Cup Has a Story" - Cute or Strategic?

An interesting example of a marketing program built around user-generated content was brought to my attention by a Canadian student—thanks, Sarah! I wasn’t familiar with the Tim Horton’s chain of coffee shops, which is huge in Canada. It beats out McDonalds for breakfast traffic there and has a growing number of shops in the U.S., mostly in the Midwest.


It’s their current campaign that is interesting in a couple of ways. It’s called “Every Cup Tells a Story,” and they’ve set up a community page on their site to host it. The stories are tagged and searchable. I clicked on dogs, and then on Duke’s picture to see his story. All very cute and sweet! From a community point of view, note that comments are moderated—good idea as far as I’m concerned. From a marketing point of view note that the story page has several “share this” options as well as a GPS store locator.

Since they seem to be into social media I did some surfing around. There are a ton of Tim Hortons commercials on YouTube, most of which seem to have been created by fans. I didn’t find any recent “real” ads, so I moved on. It was on Facebook that I hit a mother lode! A search for “Tim Horton’s” turned up over 500 groups. Most of the ones I look at seemed to be the typical fan group of one kind or another. However, the second one on this list, “Biodegradable Cups at Tim Hortons” looked interesting, so I clicked through. It’s an advocacy page, urging an environmentally acceptable solution to the problem of coffee cups as solid waste.

A frivolous issue promoted by a college student, you say? The group has over 10,000 members, so there must be something going on. There is—a big push in Toronto to do something about the volume of solid waste that’s being generated by fast-food outlets of all kinds. As one of the largest, Tim Hortons is a focus of proposed regulations. Note all the related stories and the comments listed with this article from the Globe and Mail newspaper.

This really got me to thinking. Is the “Every Cup Tells a Story” a creative way to put a positive spin on the waste disposal issue? It seems more than coincidence to me! The waste disposal problem is real, and Tim Hortons assures us they are working on it, but as far as I know there’s not yet a biodegradable coffee cup. The campaign is a bit of the warm fuzzies in the midst of the waste disposal controversy.

It would be a good campaign on its own. If it’s also a way to blunt public criticism—hopefully while they continue to work toward an ecologically-sound solution—it is brilliant!

Add Amazon to the List of "Going Green"

I’m an Amazon affiliate (“associate” in their terminology) and every so often I get an email from the program. My use of the associates program is limited to a direct sales channel for my textbook, so the emails usually are read and discarded. This one interested me—both because of the subject matter and because Amazon generally does these things so well. That seems to be true of Amazon Green.

The email is encouraging me to download a banner that promotes the program. If I download it using my associates ID number, I can add it to the items that generate referral fees. They seem to have two basic banner messages Go Green and Green Lighting as well as the various formats illustrated in the email. That probably reflects product issues, and I’d expect the number of product-specific banners to increase over time to better reflect the affiliate’s website and increase the probability of click-throughs.

When you investigate the Green 3™ program, you see it’s customer oriented. The customer can select products for the program. A purchase is required to “vote” on products—fair enough. They have over 1,500 products on the list and over 6,000 “votes” (unique customers or total of votes cast; they don’t say), so people are participating. Most of the items on the page are typical Amazon promotion, “Green Three™ Frontrunners” for example. But there are also links to resources like the federal government’s Energy Star page.
There is also a blog—of course. The description of the program on the blog is interesting. Wonder how they chose the “team of Amazonians” to participate in the Green Scene program? The blog is active and informative and you can put it on your Amazon daily page if you wish. Each blog entry has a feedback opportunity: “Interesting? Yes or No” Nice touch. On another page I found a link to a FAQs page detailing what Amazon itself is doing to be more green—they don’t miss a beat.

This doesn’t seem to be “greenwashing.” I wrote a post for eBrandMarketing not long ago in which I trashed Target for one of the most blatant examples of greenwashing that I’ve seen. Amazon’s program is promotional, it’s intended to sell more products, but the information seems legitimate. And it is set up to engage employees, customers and affiliates.

I’d suggest that a project like this—if it’s really “walking the walk” not just “talking the talk” can be highly engaging to three key groups--your employees, your customers and your affiliates. How do you describe “triple win?” That’s what it looks like!