What do you do when you have an app that’s really cool, but you know—your experience tells you, and you just know—that most people, even fans, are too distracted by daily life to go to the trouble of noticing and downloading it?
Especially when you’re used to making a splash?
If you’re Taco Bell, you dramatically shut down your social media, except for an announcement hashtagged #onlyintheapp. And the app gets used in an incredible 75% of stores.
By pulling everything off their very active and well-managed social media feeds, they got everyone’s attention. They might have made a few fans kind of nervous.
It was like they turned off the lights in a noisy room to shock everyone into paying attention.
On the layout for the creative briefs at my agency, we stuck a box on there that says “What if?” This is an example of letting smart, creative, brave, insightful people (who understand how your brand and customers relate to each other) follow a “what if?” idea all the way through to execution, not just as a fun thing to kick around in a meeting—“What if we go completely dark, take everything off our social media posts?“ “Ha. I like it. It’ll never happen, but I like it.” But what if?
Here’s one answer: mass adoption of an app that will deliver tons of useful consumer information, which the consumers look at as a cool convenience. That’s what if.
