Eric Brown of Urbane has shared some great partnership marketing stories, most recently his blog about a
shuttle bus for residents
, and today I wanted to share a quick story about our experience with Cinnabon, and how you can hopefully apply this to your apartment community!
As you may have noticed, I wrote a blog about
Resident Retention and Cinnabon
and after I wrote it, I realized that it was essentially a commercial for their company! So I called their corporate office number, which is readily available on their website, and asked for their marketing or PR department. After leaving a message about what I was doing, they actually emailed me the next day asking for more details and later about our audience size.
In the end, they agreed to give me some free Cinnabons to pass along to our members here at MFI! It wasn't much, and their out-of-pocket expense was probably less than $10, but it was a win-win for everybody, as now I get some free stuff to give out to members. But I also required people to actually participate to become eligible, which hopefully will inspire more activity on the site.
In the end, I hope you see how easily something like this could be done at your apartment communities. There are tons of local establishments that have a similar "audience" where you can do a lot of really neat win-win programs! And remember, it never hurts to ask - you never know what might happen!
(P.S. If you haven't entered to win a Cinnabon yet, just
go to the blog
and make a comment! The winners are random so you can still win!)
