Taco Bell Connects with Online Audience by Hosting Offline Debate

We are by no means out of the woods when it comes to the global pandemic, but the fact that some offline experiences have become possible again has meant that many of the most creative marketing minds are once again finding ways to bridge the online and offline worlds again.

Enter: Taco Bell and its latest campaign, The Great Crispy Chicken Sandwich Taco Debate. To launch its newest menu item, they're looking to fire up a debate that typically takes place deep in the comments section: What exactly makes a sandwich a sandwich?

The team at Taco Bell saw an opportunity to harness the passion that is typically reserved for such questions as "Does pineapple belong on pizza?" (the correct answer, of course, is yes) and they're bringing that to a live college campus to settle the feud once and for all. Airing live on ABC during the Georgia vs Clemson NCAA football game on September 4th, debate teams from the respective schools will try to determine if Taco Bell's new Crispy Chicken offering is, in fact, a sandwich, or a taco.

Beyond the obvious importance of the topic, what can we learn about the brand's latest campaign? Simply put, it's a brilliant way to reintegrate a physical brand experience back into a marketing mix that has been forced to focus almost exclusively on digital for the past 18 months.

The offline event provides a spark for a flurry of branded content, social posts, and even TV ads that will all focus their attention squarely on the new product in a way that the target audience, in this case, college students, will be actively engaged. The earned media has already started to pop up, and you can bet that the social channels are going to light up with heated takes on both sides of the issue.

Now, we don't all have access to nationally televised airtime, and we may not have the reach of Taco Bell, but each of us has a community of people who live in both the online and offline worlds.

A recent study by Informatics showed that online customers in retail tend to have a greater Customer Lifetime Value than purely offline customers, and when those same offline customers could follow up their retail interaction with a digital one, the CLV increased dramatically.

Logic would suggest that the same should be true in the opposite direction, that the more places we can provide value to people, the more times they interact with our brands, the more valuable those relationships will be in the long run.

The question that all of us should be asking ourselves is: How well are we connecting our online and offline experiences with each other?

As if on cue, the team over at Later just published a piece that could provide some thought starters: 5 Offline-to-online Marketing Tactics to Bring Your In-store Experience Online

Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting