Ridiculous Marketing As A Powerful Tool

Hi there,

I have to say I’m very excited — this is my first post on this topic and I would love to share with you my personal story.

Back in November 2017, there were dozens of car accidents in my university’s parking lot. It used to be a big issue; students and visitors parked in areas where it wasn’t allowed and blocked everyone’s field of vision. Cars illegally parked in the middle of the parking lot aisles, on the sidewalks, and even next to reserved handicapped parking spots, preventing those who were handicapped from being able to exit their vehicles with a wheelchair. 

Students were angry, nobody took action and something had to be done.

One day, my friend Gal Erlich sent me a text message saying “Let’s do something” and I immediately replied “Lets”. One thing led to another, and we decided to purchase 500 stickers with the caption “You Parked Like A Douche”. Just before class, we used to go out to the parking lot area wearing baseball caps and sunglasses and stick these stickers on cars that were parked douchebagly.

We started uploading pictures of our activity on Facebook from a fake social account and we received instant feedback; most of the students were supportive, some were not, but none were apathetic — everybody had an opinion about whether our activity was legitimate or not. Our actions went viral and we realized that we needed a disguise if we wanted to continue our mission and decrease the number of car accidents in our precious parking lot. So we randomly decided to buy giant lion costumes, which marked the very beginning of “The Parking Lions” project — the war against douchebags.

Our communication with the outside world took place on Facebook with the account name “???? ?? ?????” which means “Lion Son of A Parking Lot” in Hebrew. Everybody wanted to know who was behind this profile. This mysterious, tough yet charming character, had his own phone number, license plate, and even student ID. He studied computer science, was a second-year student, he always answered questions politely and he was very smooth with the ladies. A true superhero. At one point, we realized we should open Mr. Lion a Tinder account, which turned out to be a very amusing decision.

We purchased an additional 20,000 stickers and kept fighting careless drivers until we managed to decrease the number of car accidents from 14 to 0 in just 3 months. National TV reporters and newspapers reached out to us for interviews, students started to ask for merchandise and “The Parking Lions” project became a legitimate brand.

At this point, we realized that the project was going very well, but we were tired of spending our own money and we needed some capital to maintain what we accomplished. We decided to create a crowdfunding campaign and successfully raised the $2,500 we needed to keep the project going. After we ran out of funds again, we partnered with the motorcycle giant, Harley Davidson, which became our main sponsor.

Eventually, the car accident phenomenon stopped being a big issue and we needed to find another reason to continue our project. We pivoted from the parking lot business to “doing good” in general; we took care of the campus’s’ guards’ welfare, built a house for the campus’s cat, and even tracked down a professional scammer who ripped off dozens of students and successfully returned their money back to them. To this day, “The Parking Lions” project is the most successful and popular social project that was ever created in all of our university’s 20 years of existence.

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The interesting question here is, what made this project so successful?

Well, there are the usual factors for success such as timing — we solved a problem when it was needed the most. We created a sense of curiosity when we decided not to expose our identities. We also really cared about this project and of course, we had a lot of luck.

Leaving the “normal” factors for success aside, I believe that there’s another aspect to this case study; I call it “Ridiculous Marketing”.

Ridiculous Marketing is all about solving a relatively “minor problem” or communicating a value in a ridiculous, non-traditional, non-proportional way.

This project would have never taken off if it weren’t ridiculous. 

The term relies on the basis of humor — it’s like hatching an egg with a hammer, or flying to another continent because you were out of milk. Nobody expects a pack of big fluffy, cute-looking lions fighting douchebags in a parking lot, or anywhere. It’s bizarre, surreal, it’s… ridiculous.

In today’s world, you have to earn your spot on people’s Instagram feed, and since our project was extremely unique, we enjoyed “free” publicity; students often took pictures of us anywhere we went, selfies where commonplace and social networks became our playground. Somehow, we managed to become the most famous anonymous people in town. Some kind of a Spiderman if you wish, just instead of a spider — a lion.

Another example of Ridiculous Marketing could be Squatty Potty. They needed to communicate a value that could seem “irrelevant” for many, by explaining the angle at which people should do their “number two’s”. Sounds like mission impossible, so they created a commercial with a unicorn that poops rainbow ice cream. Makes sense? Absolutely not. And this is exactly why people will remember their commercial for years to come.

So next time, when you’re about to launch another boring campaign on social media, stop, get out of your comfort zone and ask yourself, “How is my campaign any different from the millions of other campaigns out there?”

Choose to be bold. Choose lion.