Tricky Marketing for the Bahamas with BahamaVention
I’ve been a little sick for the past few days with the flu. Which means two things (aside from the gory details) a lot of sleep and a lot of TV. With the second one, TV, I’ve also been watching a lot of commercials and one in particular has gotten my attention. A commercial for a product called BahamaVention.
The commercial appears half-way real with it’s cheesy 90’s infomercial appeal. A few goofy characters going from depressed states to super happy all with the use of a product called Bahama Vention. It doesn’t really tell you what the product does or what exactly it is, just that if you’re depressed, overworked, or under tanned, you’ll be helped with BahamaVention. You can call or visit BahamaVention.com for more information.
By the third time I was ready to find out if this was for real and what it was all about. So I went to Bahamavention.com and began reading through the “abouts” and the testimonials to see if I could get any sense of what the heck this was. What is a bahama vention?
Proven, safe, effective, and hypoallergenic, a Bahamavention is the single-most important “instrument of love” you can use to get an overworked, overstressed, and undertan loved one the treatment he or she so desperately, desperately needs.
That clears it up doesn’t it?
Well after viewing a few pages I began to notice at the top of the page that you can call the BahamaVention hotline at 1-800-BAHAMA or you can click on a link to get a free kit. The link takes you to bahamas.com. Ah, now it makes sense. What a tricky and interesting marketing scheme that was so obvious now that I know what it is promoting.
I thought I would mention this as an alternative to the classic in your face marketing approach, or gimmicky marketing approach. Like offering a coconut for joining a contest.
All the people at the Bahamas Board of Tourism wanted were people to visit their site. Everyone knows that the Bahamas has sun, tropical fish, beaches and nice hotels. So chances are a normal television ad showing a honeymooning couple holding hands walking in the sand, or a family snorkeling with yellow and orange fish wasn’t going to get people to visit the site. But making a cheesy TV comericial talking about some new seemingly great self-help program might get those bored holiday couch patatoes to visit the site bahamavention.com on their next trip to Google land.
Plus the name is memoriable. You’re going to have a Bahama-Vention to get you through being overworked, stressed out, and untanned? The name just sticks. Need some help why not a bahamavention. Although Bahamas is pretty easy it’s not that memoriable. Everyone knows that the Bahamas exist. But they don’t know what a Bahamavention is.
The commerical doesn’t really tell you exactly what the bahamavention is, and better yet the bahamavention.com site doesn’t really tell you what it is either. If you keep digging around sooner or later one of the many many links on the site will exit you to the actual Bahamas.com tourism site.
So what can we learn as budding marketers from this scheme:
1. Have stickyness - have a memorable name or logo or phrase that doesn’t neccessarily tell your audience exactly what you are selling or offering but sticks in their head when they see something related to your product.
2. Relate to Your Audience - The Bahamavention relates to most couch potatoes in cold climates by saying it solves your untan skin problem, and relates to most people in the work force by talking about solving problems with being overworked and stress out.
3. Be Elusive - Don’t mention what your product exactly is or how it can solve problems but mention what it can solve. People want to know how things get done, we’re curious beings. By only mentioning what it can solve and not how it does it, most people will be interested finding out the how and will be intrigued to learn more.
Now the Bahama Board of Tourism went even further and made the landing page for www.BahamaVention.com it’s own site rather than redirecting to www.bahamas.com. They even carried out the cheesy infomercial like ad on several pages and made it look believable. I would imagine that making a one pager with all the redirects in the world to the actual page would have the same effect, but leading people on is so much more fun.
Either way, check out www.BahamaVention.com and see what I mean. A good marketing idea that we all can learn from.
Comments
Comment from Erik
Time: January 5, 2007, 3:48 pm
Yeah, the Hawaii tourism comericials are pretty standard, “Fly to paradise” marketing schemes. I would guess that most people don’t pay too much attention to them and just end up googling Hawaii if they want to find out more about it.
The BahamaVention ad caught my attention because it was so out there crazy. A great idea for those of us looking to find better marketing ideas.
Comment from Dale
Time: January 5, 2007, 4:10 pm
The reason behind why the Hawaii tourism commercials are as such is because the same people do it every year.
From what I can remember, HTA puts out bids on marketing contracts in four of Hawaii’s major markets every year (or maybe it’s every 5 years or something like that): Continental US, Japan, Australasia, and Europe. As you can see, bidding on something like a multi-million dollar contract can potentially involve a lot of insider politics (this is Hawaii after all) where it’s who you know instead of what you know.
I can go on about this, but meh… that would be getting a little off-topic I would think.
I think another good thing about the BahamaVention marketing idea is that it’s not too obscure. A lot of marketing campaigns these days detach themselves so far from their product that it makes you kinda say “huh?” 
Comment from Adnan
Time: January 6, 2007, 10:09 am
Good post Erik. On a side note (and because I couldn’t find your contact details on the site), you asked whether I wanted a link exchange in Yaro’s forums. I replied saying that that would be great but you didn’t reply. I’ve added a link to your site and it would be awesome if you could reciprocate.
Hows the blog network going along.
Thanks,
Adnan
Comment from Erik
Time: January 8, 2007, 2:41 pm
Hey Adnan, sorry about not getting back to you sooner. I’ll surely add your blog to my blogroll. I’ve been busy trying to start 2007 on the right, and organized foot, while maintaining all the random businesses that I claim to be starting.
Hope all is well.
Aloha,
Erik
Comment from Dale
Time: January 5, 2007, 1:39 pm
Haha! This is something that’s definitely different from the usual marketing campaigns of late. I wonder if the Hawaii Tourism Authority (or HVCB) would take a hint at this. Year in and year out, I’ve seen the same marketing campaigns for Hawaii; the images and people pictures might be different, but the message is still the same.
On the flip side, I wonder if they’ve put off a few people by doing this. Not all people are as curious and as marketing educated as people like you (or anyone who follows/works/studies some form of marketing) and by this basis, they may have lost a few people who were trying to find out what BahamaVention’s all about.