Photo: iStock.

A Swedish flooring company demonstrates you can breathe new life into an old marketing tactic: sampling.

No, I’m not talking about carpet squares mounted on a board or a child’s toy-sized piece of wood floor.

Forbo Flooring Systems, working with agency Valentin&Byhr, figured out how to break-through to the architects who spec their products.  They created flip-flops made from the floor material, and packed it up in a gift box:

The agency summarized the program’s effectiveness:

“Through The Spa Offer, we got a chance to introduce our products to the target audience in a way that they were not accustomed to.  That created a lot of buzz in the industry.  When the campaign was completed, we had follow-up meetings with Forbo’s sellers and all of the architects.  The response from the target audience was overwhelming and the open rate was 98%.”

So, yes, marketers in mature product categories where seemingly everything has been tried before, there are new ways to get the attention you need from customers.  You’ve got to be strategic, smart and creative.

That’s the good news.  I wanted to find out more about the product, but alas, Forbo’s website isn’t as good as their new product sampling.  I can’t find the product, which leads to this important reminder:  there’s always something to get better at!

Headline

Swedish manufacturer Forbo Flooring Systems created a break-through sampling program using flip-flops to reach architectural customers.  Good luck finding the product on their website, though.

Harvey Chimoff is a hands-on marketing leader and business-wide collaborator who drives success in B2B/B2C organizations.