People are creatures of habit, and grocery store marketing is all about making and breaking people's habits. Grocery stores make a small profit on every visit, but if they can get you to incorporate their store into your weekly routine, after a few months that habit can be really hard to break - and amazingly profitable for the grocery store.
Because those habits are very effective competitive barriers, grocery stores spend heavily to reinforce (and to measure) your habit with tools like frequent shopper cards. And competing stores spend just as heavily to break your habit with loss leaders, coupons and other come-ons.
What makes grocery store marketing so tough is that stores can spend a lot to get new shoppers in the store, but if they don't change their shopping habits, it's just a one-time, money-losing transaction.
That's what's so ingenious about Google's
cross-promotion with Sony of the Da Vinci Code movie. Not only does Google get to ride along with Sony's massive advertising campaign to get users into Google's store, but the Da Vinci game is amazingly addictive. The puzzles start easy, then get progressively harder each day. The user has to come back tomorrow for the next puzzle, and a small scoreboard charts the user's progress in solving puzzles. This pattern continues for 24 days, culminating in a big prize and 10,000 smaller prizes just before the movie opens.
The user needs a Google Account to play, and what better way to remember to come back tomorrow than through the
Da Vinci widget on the Google Personalized Home Page? After a couple weeks of this reinforcement, it's easy to see a lot of habits changing.
I don't care if you
call it a portal or not. But Google is breaking the habits of users of competing services to get them in the store, introducing Google's services, then reinforcing their habit of regularly using Google over a period of several weeks.
If only grocery stores were so ingenious.
