Behind the Buzz - digital and interactive advertising and marketing

Subway Scrabble

by Rachel on April 2nd, 2008

Monopoly is not the only board game that is being turned into a promotion. Subway, the sandwich company, are running Subway Scrabble

(screenshot from playsubwayscrabble.com

This is pretty easy, buy a drink, get a game card, try and spell the winning words or get an instant prize. There’s about a 1 in 2 chance of the latter. The prizes are not as rich as McDonalds only going up to 5000GBP instead of 500k. you don’t have to collect all the letter to win one of the prizes as the playing board already has words set up - for example, you only need to collect U, B, A to spell Subway and win 5k. They’ve set it up so there are no shared letters between the prizes.

As with Monopoly, this is a game they have used in the US as well, if it works, why do another one. Teh buzz on the boards does not appear to be as hot as for the bigger prize contest, but there still seems to be a market for swapping the letters. Along with that discussion, is one about the brand and the product. Promotions used to be run just to increase sales - the offer of winning something for ‘free’ was a good enticement. Now, with constant discussion of contests on the web, it opens up opportunities to discuss the brand at the same time; unfortunately what I’ve seen on the Subway stuff is not that complimentary. A risk the promoting brand has to take, balancing the draw of free things with the potential for far more negative buzz about a product than they would have got doing nothing.

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POSTED IN: Buzz Marketing, Competition, Consumer Packaged Goods