Kya aapke toothbrush main Koyla Hain?

The relationship with BlogAdda has been a long standing one. Started by joining the network by mere registration on the site and then discovering the book reviews club and then reviewing the books on regular basis and then becoming part of several blogger meets.

Last weekend was in Goa for a Blogger Meet and this week was a very innovative and interesting marketing campaign around the launch of a new unheard and unseen product.

The #WhatTheBlack campaign was a novel idea creating a run-up to the final product launch giving clues and hints making people guess what the final product was. It was conceived as a 4 day event with the first 3 days having clues (black objects which are traditionally white) delivered to our homes and the actual product on day 4.

The name of the campaign was indeed the first clue - #WhatTheBlack – clearly pointed to a product which would be black in color. Black is often the color used to signify class, privilege, sleek, slender, style … so when a Black Egg arrived on the first day it created a lot of confusion, intrigue and so much twitter fun with people beginning to wonder what we had got ourselves into. We all posted pics of the black eggs and when I brought my nose to the egg, I could smell chocolate. And that's when I realized that it was a chocolate filled egg. Interesting and the seeds of a mystery were sown

<< A note here though; next some marketer sends me an egg, I am not even going to touch it – it will go straight to the dustbin and I will write a stinker to them for sending an egg into a pure vegetarian household. I am a pure vegetarian and I actually handled the egg assuming it was some egg shaped object. I pretty much hate that insensitive idiot who thought sending eggs to people was a good idea. And yeah, while I am at it, the quality of their objects was pretty bad. The egg stained our hands and even the black objects on following 2 days left our hands black. Not good. Not good at all.>>

So coming back to the campaign; day 2 brought home an all black newspaper with various articles related to black … a black cricket ball and cricketers in black uniform and of course the black egg too. The footer did mention that the newspaper was a work of fiction and name of the marketing company that put it out.

So some smart tweeps and bloggers began to google for the company and of course key word black and of course there were hundreds of tweets exploring what the final product could be. Most people (including me) connected that the Egg and the Newspaper were morning items and the product had to do something with the morning. The chocolate inside the egg was a bit confusing because chocolate isn't really a morning product. Another clue was that white things were going black so people began to wonder about all things white that we use in the morning that could go black – some even suggested Black Milk. Other items in the race ranged from Black Coffee/Tea to a swanky new Black gadget (a new mobile phone that would change the way we live our lives <first thing we do when we wake up is look at the phone>.

In between all this, we found the Malaysian website for the black toothbrush and that looked like a very very probable product that was new, unheard and unseen and it related to the morning chores too. And finally the chocolate made sense – chocolate leads to tooth decay and you fight that with a toothbrush and toothbrush bristles have traditionally been all white and this new product had black bristles.

So, although the probability seemed very high that the product would be the new Colgate Charcoal tooth brush, we continued to play the game. The next day a paper cup arrived taking our conclusion further in the direction of the tooth-brush.

Day 4 came with the promise of the revelation of the final product and incidentally, before we got the product, it was unveiled on their website – www.WhatTheBlack.com

So, all in all, (except for the black staining our hands and the eggs sent to vegetarian homes) the campaign was a good and interesting one. We all enjoyed while it lasted and had some good fun tweeting about it and doing some twitter brainstorming to unravel the mystery. I am sure the product got a nice innovative launch and it might even have trended …

Over the period of 4 days, I posted the pics of all the 'black' products that I received. The chocolate-filled-egg, the black newspaper with white newsprint and interesting articles about black objects, the black paper cup and black tissue paper and finally the black toothbrush. Here are the pics once again .. and of course a picture highlighting the features of the new product - Colgate Charcoal Tooth Brush.