7-Eleven Slurpees: B2B Marketing Lessons from Bring Your Own Cup Day with Chief Revenue Officer & Head of Marketing at Black Crow AI, JoAnn

How are you celebrating your hero product? Better yet, how are you activating your audience to celebrate your hero product?

7-Eleven has a lot to teach us about that with their Bring Your Own Cup Day. 

If you’ve never taken part, they encourage customers to bring in a vessel of choice to fill with Slurpee.

They’ve seen people bring in cowboy hats, kiddie pools, even a prosthetic leg, and fill them to the brim with that slushy, cold, refreshing fizzy iconic drink.

And customers are posting about it. It’s ALL over social media. 

Having your customers post to their own social media about your product is just about any marketer’s dream.

So let’s talk about how to do it! In this episode, we’re talking about marketing lessons from 7-Eleven’s Bring Your Own Cup Day.

With the help of our special guest, Chief Revenue Officer & Head of Marketing at Black Crow AI, JoAnn Martin, we talk about activating your community around your hero product, leaving it to the internet, and increasing the value of your engagement with customers.

About our guest, JoAnn Martin

JoAnn Martin is Chief Revenue Officer & Head of Marketing at Black Crow AI. Prior to joining the company in November 2023, she served as VP of Marketing at Electric. She has also held marketing leadership roles at Searchspring, Hanzo and Provenir. She serves as an advisor to UserGems.

What B2B Companies Can Learn From Bring Your Own Cup Day:

• Activate your community around your hero product. Create opportunities for your audience to celebrate your core product. JoAnn says, “ It's finding the product and the fit with the market and figuring out how you put that in front of the right customer, which is really foundationally strategic marketing.  And that gives you great opportunities to have those celebrations or to create those experiences.” And Ian says, “It’s important to have a day,” like 7-Eleven’s Bring Your Own Cup Day, which celebrates their hero product, the Slurpee, by having customers bring in their own vessel of choice. It’s silly and fun and highlights the Slurpee as an iconic product.
• Leave it to the internet. Ask your audience online for input on your marketing. For instance, have them name a product, or get ideas for your next campaign. JoAnn says, “ When you leave things to the internet, great things can happen. But also it can go wheels off very fast. But that's part of the beauty of it, right? Is the wheels off-ness, is why it's novel and fun and you feel part of something. So you never know where it's going to go.” So maybe put some limits around what you ask for, but it’s a resource ready to be tapped into.
• Increase the value of your engagement with customers. Think about diversifying your offerings within the same vertical or to appeal to the same target buyer.  JoAnn says, “A lot of companies struggle with, ‘How do we find something else that increases the value of our engagement with a customer?’ Or ‘How do we build in an upsell strategy with our B2B SaaS company?’ You've launched a core product for your customers. And customers love that core product. But as you grow as a company, you need to be able to develop more value for them. And you need to be able to develop more value to broaden your addressable market. And one of the learnings I take away is that they went and found that value. And for us as B2B marketers, maybe we can be a little more creative about the way that we find that additional value we can bring to our customers all the time.” Like 7-Eleven was already appealing to kids with their penny candy and video games. Add on to that an option for sugar-caffeine-fizz fix and the Slurpee was bound to become a hit too.

Quotes

*” How do I better partner with my product teammates? What's this Product-Marketing relationship? How do we get away from Product builds a thing and throws it all over the wall and Marketing figures out how to talk about it?’ And it's a challenge. And I think this is a great example that those two disciplines are actually very tightly intertwined. And as marketers and product leaders and startups, we have to figure out how we're coming together to figure out what is that thing that celebrates our core product? What is the core product we put in front of a customer that has great fit for that customer and how do we figure out how to talk about it with them?”

*” The concept of really tightly intertwining your product and how your customers experience that product and how you talk about it is really inspiring.”

*” Great companies lean into the kind of messy pieces, but you have to be willing to lean into the kind of absurd, messy parts of the business.”

Time Stamps

[0:55] Meet JoAnn Martin, Chief Revenue Officer & Head of Marketing at Black Crow AI

[2:49] The Concept and Impact of BYOC Day

[5:50] The Backstory Behind Slurpees

[11:24] Marketing Strategies and Customer Engagement

[15:09] Innovative Marketing and Product Development

[28:32] Upcoming Exciting Projects at Black Crow AI

Links

Connect with JoAnn on LinkedIn

Learn more about Black Crow AI

About Remarkable!

Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both nonfiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com. 

In today’s episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Senior Producer). Remarkable was produced this week by Meredith Gooderham, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK. 

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