Last night I went to watch a top notch South African band (Jules and the fools) and ended up chatting with an old mate, Ben Peters, who has subtly been re-launching his band ‘Plush’ in South Africa. I mention this because of the ingenious way Ben has gone about generating buzz on a shoestring budget…

With a marketing budget of about R150 Ben took matters to his washing line and bought 3000 pegs (about 3c each) and two stamp pads saying “Plush” and “www.plush.us”. After the understandably “gruelling” process of stamping all the pegs they were left with the following marvel of the marketing world:

But, it didn’t stop there. Ben, the rest of the band and his representatives in other cities then started handing these pegs out by subtly pegging their target market in public places. Imagine that, getting home with a peg on your clothes and not a clue where it came from (yes, it happened to me).
Next, Plush created a “Have you been pegged yet?!” Facebook group (which grew from 0 to 479 members in a week) and have incentivised others to tag their Plush peg in their photos (and then to pass the pegs on).

Genius, viral, cheap and an excellent display of micro-marketing!
Nice one Ben, I’ll be pegging it on and waiting for your next brainchild.