700 eggs, 14 bags of flour and 26 pints of milk.

Pancake Day! A day celebrated by many in the United Kingdom where we all sit down to eat and enjoy pancakes after dinner, sharing photographs over social media of what each other had and discuss what your favourite topping is between friends. 

In marketing terms this day can be considered as a ‘ritual’. A ritual is “a set of multiple, symbolic behaviours that occurs in a fixed sequence and is repeated periodically” (Soloman, 2010, pg. 614). Pancake Day (or Shrove Tuesday) is a Christian festival that happens on an annual basis and is the day before Lent begins, when you are meant to give up certain foods/activities for 40 days. 

Marketers use these rituals as a marketing tool to engage with consumers. This Pancake Day saw Centre Parcs getting involved with consumers by promoting their restaurant The Pancake House.

The Pancake House in Sherwood Forest took part in a Guinness World Record of “Tallest Stack of Pancakes in the World” and succeeded building to the height of 101.8cm, which used 700 eggs, 14 bags of flour and 26 pints of milk. The attempt to build this tower took 45 minutes and around a month worth of planning and training. 

By using this day to provide an experiential event, where the audience could eat the pancakes after the tower had been created, Centre Parcs are using this as a free marketing tool. On Pancake Day, everyone will be talking about it and if a company takes part in a ritual that a lot of people take part in, they will have interest in to reading what the company is doing around this ritual. This will boost the company’s image and recognition, in hope that people talk amongst friends about the event and who ran it and spread word around this company. Which is a form of free marketing by word of mouth. 

Below is the video of the Pancake House at Centre Parcs in Sherwood Forrest building the pancake stack, enjoy!

References

Soloman, M. (2010). Consumer behavior. [S.l.]: Pearson Education.