The Clean Bottle Guerrilla Marketing Story

February 2, 2011 by Ryan Lum - 2 comments

Today I wanted to cover a really interesting marketing campaign by Clean Bottle, a wonderful new water bottle that unscrews from both ends to make cleaning a breeze.

During the Tour de France, they dressed up like a giant Clean Bottle and ran alongside the riders on the mountain stages. The marketing campaign generated a lot of buzz and gained a considerable amount of coverage.

I had a chance to ask David Mayer, Founder of Clean Bottle, a couple questions regarding the marketing stunt:

Did you face any legal issues?

No. I am not actually sure what the laws are about something like this – they are public roads and I am watching the race. I took the ‘beg for forgiveness instead of ask for permission’ tact.

What were some of the biggest challenges?

Hauling that thing around. Not only up the mountains, but driving it, getting it on the plane, around the airport. I had two of them plus a bike, it was crazy. Look at [...] how big those boxes are.

It was pretty crazy – driving around france all night to get to the next stage and then dragging that costume up the mountain every day, all while trying to avoid the police. It was funny – the costume didn’t fold down at all and we had it in a big black bag, so everyone kept asking if it was a dead body.

How did the campaign increase your sales/product awareness?

It was insane. We did over $50K in sales in two weeks just from our online store. Our bottles were also in REI, and during the month of July the term “clean bottle’ was the third most searched for term on REI.com

Prior to the Tour we received 10-15 online orders a day, which I was very happy with. In ONE day during the tour we received 570!

We launched in May and have gotten great traction since then. We are in all the REIs and EMSs, about 2000 bike shops in the US, and Dick’s and Performance Bicycles recently placed orders. As of last week we were also the highest selling plastic sports bottle on Amazon.com.

Watch the Guerrilla Marketing Campaign Below

Watch the ‘Behind the Scenes’ Video

Click here for more information about Clean Bottle

http://www.groundfloormedia.com CMcCabe

The coverage generated by this campaign is amazing! Was it truly a stunt only, or was there a buy component? Amazing buzz – including multiple mentions of the website which had to have been key to the sales success. Thanks for sharing!
http://www.buildandbalance.com/ Michael_N

Great and thorough post on this story. Key thing I’d like to note is that this was well beyond simply using time and energy as there was obviously significant expense involved in launching this campaign. However, from the results mentioned the ROI was enormous. Very well done.