Hotcow create nationwide sampling campaigns for all types of brands and their subsequent agencies. We know that how much you will pay for your product sampling campaign will ultimately depend on 2 core things.
1. Which venue or environment do you want to target? For example: shopping centres, train stations, offices, events, festivals, trade shows, supermarkets?
2. How much current awareness does your brand have in the marketplace?
So what does that really mean….and I will answer the question directly at the end of the article with some ballpark cost per sample figures.
Venues all come at different prices based on the number of people or traffic that go through that location per day. The higher the volume of people the higher cost of the venue fee. Typically London always is more expensive then regional locations – purely due to the mathematics of more population and higher penetration. Based on this fact it ultimately changes the overall cost per sample per location and venue we visit due to the cost set by the venue owner. A venue cost in London can range from £1,200 – £5,000 per day.
What are your current brand and/or product awareness levels? This means do you track your brand value via a well-known scorecard like the net promoter score? Do you know if your brand visibility and consumer acceptance levels are on the increase, decrease or staying the same?
This all has an impact on the level of engagement you need to have with customers on a face to face level. If it is a new product with a low awareness brand, you will need higher levels of engagement and communication materials to get people to really understand your offering and why they should use it. This has a knock on effect of a higher cost per sample.
If you are a brand like Coca Cola who has spent billions over the years building its brand popularity, and you’re launched a new product that is closely associated with this name, you will be able to use a low engagement product sampling campaign. That’s because people already have an idea of the brand, what it means and what it does.
If you have low penetration, low awareness and a new product we need to stimulate consumers and the conversation from multiple angles at the same time. This means that your cost per sample will be higher as we have to spend more time educating people on who you are, how it benefits them, why and where they can buy the product. But we can leverage this to deliver immediate results by being located closer to the point of purchase, bringing the product closer to our sampling activity, offering people incentives to buy now, getting them to enter competitions to continue the conversation after we have left and much more.
To answer the question, how much should you be paying for product sampling a good ball park would be:
1. A well established brand/company (depending on the environment) should expect to pay between £0.30 – £0.80p excluding the creative development.
2. For a brand with low-medium awareness, with a new product (depending on the environment) should expect to pay between £0.50 – £1.80 excluding the creative development.
Remember that the more days you activate the campaign, the lower the cost per sample becomes and the higher the rewards you get. Create hardwearing visual assets that can be used time and time again over a set period of time to maximise your expenditure and budget.
If you are considering product sampling for your product launch, or to reinvigorate your brand with a specific target group or simply to increase sales in a specific region then get in touch and ask us for our media pack – 0207 503 0442 or info@hotcow.co.uk.
Hotcow is a non-traditional creative agency that specialises in experiential marketing that goes viral. Our campaigns generate buzz through crowd participation, PR and content sharing. Contact us on 0207 5030442 or email us on info@hotcow.co.uk.
