Willy Wonka Tees it Up

Remember the glorious tension as Charlie Bucket tentatively opened his chocolate bar, searching for one of the Golden Tickets in “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory?” Last summer Nike used the same tactic to sell golf balls, placing 2,000 platinum balls in random retail packages.

Golfers who found one registered at www.teeitupwithtiger.com for a chance to win one of 24 spots to golf with Tiger Woods. I doubt if golfers actually trembled when they opened their boxes of balls, like charlie did, but I guarantee the ones who won trembled when they met up with Tiger last week when the prizes were awarded.

I’m impressed that Nike, with all the resources and connections at their disposal, used a very basic but always effective tactic: the in-pack prize. Packaged goods control very little in the retail channel except for the product and packaging. So Nike was smart to leverage that asset. I’m sure there were a thousand reasons not to do it at the factory level–lead times, security, distribution, blah blah blah.

But they did the one thing they could control to get a guy, standing at the ball display with a hundred choices, to pick up the Nike ball; they put a priceless commodity inside the box. (And bless them for not putting a certificate, or some other easy-to-insert redemption form, inside. They put an honest-to-God platinum-colored ball in there, evoking the inner kid in every grown-up golfer, still searching for the metaphoric Ovaltine decoder ring.) The winners collected their dream from Tiger last week; it’s not clear whether Veruca Salt was among them.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FisdKLnJ8Qk[/youtube]