For those of you non-football fans out there, Randy Moss, a star wide receiver in the NFL, was recently released by the Minnesota Vikings a team that traded a draft pick to acquire the receiver only a month earlier. While there were a number of reasons for his release from the team, one situation that didn't help his cause occurred at a local restaurant last Friday.
Every Friday the Vikings choose a local restaurant to cater a meal for the team. Last Friday, the team went to Tinucci's. According to the restaurants owner, Gus Tinucci, Randy approached the food spread and didn't like what he found.
"We had the whole buffet set up, and we had a nice spread: chicken, ribs, round of beef with a carving station, the whole deal," Tinucci's co-owner Gus Tinucci told the St. Paul Pioneer-Press earlier this week. "(Moss) he comes in, and I'm helping one of the guys and didn't look up, and all of a sudden I heard, 'What the (expletive) is this? I wouldn't feed this (expletive expletive) to my (expletive) dog!
Nobody said anything except for one who said, 'Shut the (expletive) up, Randy,' " Tinucci said. "If (Brett) Favre would have had a ball, he would have beaned him right in the head. Favre looked at him like, 'Are you kidding me?' "
Obviously, the entire situation was embarrassing for the team as well as the owners of the restaurant. The story received national publicity and now Tinucci's found itself connected with one man's poor opinion of their food.
Inspirational Marketing
At this point Tinucci's could have let the diva, receiver's opinion fade into the abyss and kept on doing what they do. Instead, they seized the opportunity with an inspirational marketing campaign. According to Yahoo Sports:
Tinucci's, the suburban Minneapolis restaurant that provided a catered lunch that Moss said he wouldn't feed to his dog, will on Friday offer free lunches to the first 50 people who come to turn in their Moss jerseys.
For everyone else, the lunch buffet will be marked down to $8.40, a takeoff on the receiver's No. 84 jersey. The Moss jerseys and cash will be donated to Boys & Girls Clubs.
That's awesome! A tip of the hat to Tinucci's for taking a bad situation, being the bigger man, and turning it into a fantastic marketing campaign.
Photo by Keith Allison
While clever, how is this story inspirational and fantastic? Without information like how much he raised, whether his business is up/down/the same, the reaction of his regular customers, and how he plans to leverage this publicity going forward, it's not a particularly useful marketing case study. Just an anecdote.
I don't think that a marketing campaign necessarily needs to be successful in order to be inspirational. That being said, I will agree with you that without any numbers to back up the success of the campaign, using it as a case study for "fantastic" marketing is a stretch.