It was 2002 and Snapple had hired an ad agency to help them find new ways to keep their customers engaged. During one of the meetings, someone brought up the idea that the space under the bottle cap was unused real estate.
The ad agency came up with an idea that is now known as “Real Facts”. These facts are clever bits of trivia that are written underneath the Snapple bottle cap.
The facts are surprising, entertaining and sometimes almost unbelievable. What happens when you learn something that is surprising, entertaining or almost unbelievable? You want to share it.
Here are a couple of examples of Snapple’s Real Facts.
Fact number 37: a snail breaths through its foot.
Fact number 682: the giant panda can eat up to 83 pounds of bamboo a day.
Fact number 1360: Bluetooth technology was named after a 10th-century Scandinavian king.
As people shared these facts, it helped deepen and create social bonds. These positive feelings were then to a degree associated with drinking Snapple beverages. It’s a pretty powerful use of a little bit of real estate under a bottle cap.
Is there any unused “real estate” you could find in your business? Maybe you don’t have a little real estate underneath a bottle cap, but what do you have? What little opportunity might be hiding in plain sight that you could leverage to help your business stand out from the crowd?”
Photo credit: You’re making us thirsty, Aj Alao.