So You Think You Can Market?

So I promised myself once the contest started, I would be doing it mostly for the extra points. Well, lets through that idea out the window right now. I graduate in May so I think winning something like this would look pretty sweet on my resume.

So if you've clicked through from the site, and haven't voted, I wanted to take a little bit of your time to talk about the contest. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I entered an online contest called "So You Think You Can Market?". The professor for the class offered extra point, which I very much needed, so I decided to participate.

The contests is for www.thebargainqueen.com, and how they can possibly attract male viewers to what appears to be a female dominate site. You have a limited budget of $500, so your ideas have to really work on the WOM principle.

I wrote up a page long explanation, but they only put in a paragraph (understandable). However, since the only comment to the contest mentioned "But I don't understand the model for the second one. My vote goes to the first one of the two:", I decided to use my blog to promote my idea.

My idea is pretty simple. Facebook is a growing web site that males and females our age find themselves on everyday. One of the newest statistic I heard was that Facebook is actually more popular than porn with kids ages 18-24. We all know the gifts application, where you can send gifts to your friends for a dollar (they are just little icons that they can collect). Well my idea is for every time the Bargain Queen has a new product to promote, they create and icon that looks exactly like it. They then partner with facebook to give users the ability to buy the icon and send it to there friends. There are two perks to this.

First off, students in class mentioned how they usually don't buy the gifts unless they know the money goes to charity. I suggest Bargain Queen partners with a charity and donates half of the proceedings to that charity. This way, Bargain Queen gets nice rep for helping out charity, and they are helping themselves.

The second perk is by sending the person the icon, you automatically enter them into a drawing that can actually win them that item in real form. Winners will be drawn at the end of the month, and people who are chosen will then receive their free real life gift in the mail.

So thats my plan, and I'm sticken to it. They pitted me up against a professional from Washington DC with a good idea, so it'll be interesting to see how it pans out. If you wish to vote (do it), then click the link below.

So You Think You Can Market?