Online noodles marketing

From the UK, an interesting application of online geo marketing. Wagamama, an Asian chain with over 60 restaurants in the country, is about to start its first online campaign in partnership with Multimap. Their idea is to target anyone preparing to visit an area near any of their shops. As explained on Brand Republic, a message will appear on the screen calling for people to “click here for noodles in this area”. Then, on click, all the restaurants in the area will be pinpointed on the map in detail.

I very much like the idea. It’s a smart way to mix geo targeted and affinity marketing.

It’s “easy” to imagine such an approach for a campaign vs a competitor; for example, you look for a Zara store and the map shows you (also) a message to visit the closest H&M store. But in Wagamama case they took search engine marketing a step ahead, working on the assumption that, if you go shopping in a certain area you might get hungry at a certain point or, if you go and visit a friend, you might decide to order food and, at that stage, you will recall there’s a Wagamama in the neighbourhood.
Am I working too much on assumptions? Maybe, but still I believe it’s important to think & think and think (differently) to fully exploit the potentials of the tools online marketing offers us, and Wagamama’s looks like a good example of search engine creative thinking that will definitely work better than a banner campaign.

This said, a leave you with an amusing note… Wagamama is running its first online campaign on Multimap, but on their site, they use Google Maps to display their restaurants on the map. As Alanis used to sing, isn’t this ironic?