How one cheeky Facebook post was seized upon by Guzman y Gomez’s savvy CMO
One Wednesday night in November last year, Lara Thom was up late browsing Facebook when she came across a post that caught her eye. It was from Cal Ryan, a 21-year-old from Albany Creek in Queensland, who was working in the travel industry in the UK. He’d written to Guzman y Gomez, where Thom worked as CMO, complaining about the lack of restaurants outside Australia. “It was a very cheeky email,” Lara says, talking to Jules Lund on Facebook’s Face 2 Face podcast. “It expressed his disgust that he couldn’t get a GYG burrito in London.”
The message, written at 8:30pm, went on to joke how he felt “deprived and marginalised” because he wasn’t able to enjoy his favourite chicken fajita bowl with brown rice and guacamole. “I put forward a proposition for a new campaign,” he wrote. “Bring Cal Home For A Burrito, where I’m flown from London to Brisbane for a burrito, then back to London where I shall continue to live my life.
“Is this something you’re open to?”
And so, sensing the opportunity, Thom instructed her team to respond the very next day, but with a challenge: if Ryan could chalk up 3,000 comments and 1,000 shares of the post, GYG would indeed fly him to Queensland to celebrate the opening of their 100th store, a couple of weeks later.
Click to see Cal Ryan’s original post
But if Ryan was a canny operator, he’d met his match in Thom. Her route to the top job, nine months earlier, came alongside a quite unusual CV. She started her career working as a wily journo, before launching her own successful ventures, including digital agency Be.Interactive, baby brand L’il Fraser Collection and the Junior MasterChef range of children’s cookware and aprons. Her first big, daring move as GYG CMO, meanwhile, was to temporarily halt all traditional media spend, and shift it to funding mobile and social media.
Face 2 Face host Jules Lund with GyG’s Lara Thom and TBWA’s Kimberlee Wells
The way Ryan tells it, writing on his blog, what happened next was a surprise media frenzy. “My good friend Maddie was the first to write about it on Nova, which then shot it through the realm of media. And sure enough, just shy of 21 hours later, I’d reached the 3000 comments, and 1000 shares.”
Except, it wasn’t quite that straightforward, as Thom explains. “What I didn’t know is this kid worked for Nova himself and comes from a media family. He worked the phones and got on every radio station in Australia. I had friends calling from Newcastle saying ‘I’ve heard this kid.’
“We then realised we had PR gold on our hands. We were like, ‘Right, we’re off!’”
Thom’s candid comments were eked out by Jules Lund in Facebook’s Face 2 Face podcast series. The show brings together leaders from across the industry – including agencies, consultancies and marketers – to discuss how they were able to click with consumers. Highlights from future episodes include KPMG’s Carmen Bekker and Velocity Frequent Flyer’s Dean Chadwick talking about what keeps CMOs up at night; AFL’s Julian Dunne and Initiative’s John Dawson chatting about how marketing can be inspirational and change the world; and Optus’ Parag Panjwani and Host/Havas’s Paul Bootlis’s wondering what makes a great idea.
Come GYG’s big day, Thom made sure the brand went far beyond its stated prize. “Cal’s brother was also in London, so we surprised his parents and brought him home, too,” she says. “And another of his siblings had just had a baby that neither of them had met.” As well as the big store opening, the family were also given a free lunch in their local branch and were put up in a penthouse suite with ocean views.
“It was an unreal experience,” writes Ryan. “The GYG team made me feel like a celebrity for the day. Customers were taking photos of me, store managers came to visit and the founders kept pulling me into everything! Channel 7 news and SCA were standing by waiting for me, and even friends I met around Europe turned up.”
In fact, the coverage was extraordinary. There was an organic reach of 1.2 million and more than 42,000 social media interactions. And that’s not including coverage on traditional media including Daily Mail Australia, News.com, as well as Nova and Channel 7. “The kid was an absolute local hero,” says Thom. “It’s now mythical in the business. We keep asking, ‘Who is going to be the next Cal and what will they do to get a burrito?’ A chef even sent us a rap on Facebook written to an Eminem song. He made fries and Coke seem cool.”
But the incident has also made GYG rethink its entire marketing strategy. Traditional media is back, but the new ‘food stories’ campaign shifts the focus to communicating the tales behind the brand and its customers. Meanwhile, the 400 bus adverts are complemented by a renewed focus on social. “Our sales have increased by 10% because we’ve given the keys over to different social media platforms. From a new veg dish to nacho fries, once we’ve released content into the wild, our Facebook and Instagram pages go crazy. People want to tell their friends about it.
“Social can shift the dial.”
Click here to listen to Face 2 Face on iTunes, Google or Spotify.
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Social can shift the dial when promoted on traditional media, would seem more appropriate based on the evidence presented.
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Indeed, this does seem to be predominantly a traditional media story. Just from a PR rather than above line advertising aspect.
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