Good Marketing: Evian’s Skin Giveaway

Evian, the French mineral-water people, are conducting a pretty good marketing initiative in Second Life which shows the company, or at least its ad agency, understands how to promote effectively to residents. Basically, it’s a RL-SL match-up with low overhead for the RL brand and a good traffic booster for the SL company.

Here’s how it works: Visit the realSKIN store and click the Evian dispenser machine in the Free-Skin area at the rear of the store. You’ll get a folder with a prim Evian water bottle and six sets of anatomically correct realSKIN skins and shapes, one set each for Asian, black and white males and females. Open the folder, try on the shapes and skins, and see how you look.

Why does this promotion work? Three reasons:

First: it was broadcast through resident channels. I heard about it through the Fashion Consolidated group, where designers announce sales, promotions, new designs and giveaways. That gives it more legitimacy than a RL press release.
Second: it involves a giveaway, something to help residents improve their lives.
Third: the giveaway was something a resident could actually use … a skin and shape to help you lose your newbie look. It’s a giveaway with a rough value of $1,000 based on shapes and skins of similar quality sold around SL. Whether it’s a good shape and skin is your call … it didn’t work for me although the Asian female skin was pretty nice.
And a bonus fourth: It worked the first time! It didn’t lag or crash me, the machine worked the first time, I didn’t have to punch in a code … I just TP’d there, clicked the machine and got my freebie.

What value Evian will realize from this promotion? I leave that up to the marketing experts to decide, but it surely must have been low-cost. For realSKIN, it should give them a heads-up in the competitive skin-design community and boost their traffic. Everybody wins. Other companies who whined about the value of promoting in SL, please take notes.