Not On The High Street: Gift-O-Matic

Another experiential marketing campaign that took place during the Christmas period in 2015 was the “Gift-O-Matic” by Not On The High Street, which was a twitter-powered vending machine. 

Not On The High Street is a website that sells unique handmade gifts, made by small businesses and their goal is to: “to hunt out the most original items from the best creative small businesses, and bring them together in one place, making it easy for people to browse and buy.”

Perfect for last minute shoppers, two of these vending machines were placed in two of London’s busiest train stations, Waterloo and Paddington, on 21^st December.

The machines will interact with the customers by getting them to tweet in the company @notonthehighstreet with their location and a hashtag that perfectly describes the person they are buying the present for, choosing from 5 different personality types such as: #Foodie, #PetLover or #Gardener. 

Customers were then given dispensed a free gift. Inside was a range of gifts that were all prodicts from 5,000 small businesses that are featured on the “Not On The High Street” website. 

The vending machines were reportedly not hard to miss in the busy train stations as they were all brightly coloured with each present dispensed individually gift grabbed, with Not On the High Street bright coloured gift wrap with huge bows covering them. Vision is the most targeted sensory in this campaign as it is using bright colours and oversized material to catch the eye of the consumer gaining their attention. The gift wrap was purposely covered in the company’s name as a reminder for the consumer where the gift came from with details of the company website. So in the future the consumer can access this website again. Which is spreading the word of this company through suppling consumers with free gifts to get a taster of products are on website.

Not On The High Street’s aims of this campaign were to attract new customers and giving them, and existing customers, a new surprise for them and a delight at Christmas, whilst trying to give them some ease to their Christmas Shopping (especially those who had left it to the last minute). By getting the customers to tweet in it is spreading the word about Not On The High Street, expanding their market, by getting their customers to actually spread the word for them. 

The machines were said to be attracting attention from the moment they were opened and were a great way to spread Christmas cheer, as well as getting the name of the company Not On The High Street spread around. The company supports small businesses so each of the gifts given were unique and can all be found on the company’s website, the idea behind this way to avoid panic buying and to give a present that was thoughtful. In hope that in the following years, the customers remember this website and use it.