DALLAS - Earlier this month, 7-Eleven Inc. transformed 12 stores into Kwik-E-Marts, the convenience store made famous on Fox's The Simpsons and featured in Twentieth Century Fox's The Simpsons Movie, in theaters on Friday. The Kwik-E-Mart stores are in Manhattan; Bladensburg, Md.; Orlando; Chicago; Dallas; Denver; Henderson, Nev.; Los Angeles; Burbank, Calif.; Mountain View, Calif.; Seattle; and Vancouver, B.C. The stores, as well as other U.S. and Canadian 7-Elevens, are carrying such Simpsons products as KrustyO's cereal, Buzz Cola, Squishee frozen drinks and Sprinklicious donuts.
Since [image-nocss] the promotion started July 2, the stores have sold more than 1.1 million Squishees, 960,000 cans of Buzz Cola and 880,400 Sprinklicious donuts, reported ABC News. In total, the chain has sold more than 3.4 million units of Simpsons merchandise and generated 64.3 million clicks on its website.
The Simpsons Movie tie-in has been phenomenal, and so much fun for our franchisees, employees, customers and Simpsons fans,' Rita Bargerhuff, senior director of marketing at 7-Eleven, told ABC News. While we knew that our customers and Simpsons fans were often the same people, it has been amazing to hear stories of how people would drive across state lines to see the life-size characters, try the Sprinklicious donuts, buy Buzz Cola and KrustyOs and chuckle at the amusing signs throughout the store.
So are the Simpsons products helping 7-Eleven's bottom line? The private company, based in Dallas, doesn't release detailed sales figures, but it did give ABC News a summary of some of its Simpsons-related sales. Because the company branded only 12 of its 6,000 stores as Kwik-E-Marts, a doubling of sales in those locations really doesn't affect the company's overall sales, said the report.
While fast food tie-ins are still a major part of promoting a new film, today Hollywood seeks larger and more creative means to create buzz. The Simpsons Movie promotion further blurs the line between reality and fiction. Marketers used to work real-life products into movies and TV shows. While that still happens, today some highly known fake products are creeping into reality.
One of the first was the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., a seafood restaurant chain that came out of the hit 1994 movie Forrest Gump.' The first restaurant opened two years after the movie premiered. There are now 21 outlets in the United States and seven abroad. Items from the Harry Potter books and movies have also jumped from fiction to reality. Candy from the books'Bertie Bott's Beans'are now available from jelly bean manufacturer Jelly Belly.
The Simpsons 7-Eleven campaign feels wonderfully fresh to me,' Drew Neisser, CEO of Renegade Marketing Group told ABC News when the promotion started. Fans are already buzzing about it. This is an inside joke on a colossal scale. Among Simpsons fans, this conversion is sure to enhance their perceptions of 7-Eleven as a cool place to shop.
New marketing techniques are aimed at cutting through all the clutter in the traditional marketing areas of TV and radio, said Kevin Corbett, a professor at Central Michigan University's School of Broadcast and Cinematic Arts.
But he said what was unique about the 7-Eleven campaign was that it jumped back to one of the oldest forms of advertising: storefront ads.
Many stores still use sandwich-board-style advertising, he said.
In an age where the costs of promoting and marketing a movie can be greater than the actual production costs, these old-school' marketing techniques are kind of interesting,' Corbett told ABC News. Whether or not they're effective is another matter.
Stephanie Sigg, a freelance art director who worked for a number of ad agencies and in other areas of the entertainment industry, said advertisers are now trying to create brand experiences.' People are looking for new ways to activate and entice an audience, she told ABC News.
Will a campaign at 12 stores really draw millions of people to The Simpsons Movie? I think this effort is designed to get the hardcore Simpsons fans excited and in seats opening weekend,' Neisser said. If they go in droves, they can then spread the word to the less enthusiastic fence sitters.
Several of those fans were packed into a New York 7-Eleven on its first day of Simpsons sales, buying any product they could. The store ran out of the KrustyO's by 1 p.m. Jill Duboff of New York was one of those fans. She spent $18.09 on Simpsons goods in the store near Times Square. Her purchases included some Buzz cola and copies of the Radioactive Man' comic book. I'm so happy. I'm such a huge Simpsons fan,' she told ABC News on the way out of the store.
Will this promotion make her more likely to see the film? I would have seen the movie anyway,' she said, but I would not have shopped at 7-Eleven otherwise.
Meanwhile, the promotion has included Indian employees dressed up as fictional Indian store owner and immigrant Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, a gimmick that has not gone down well with some Indians who feel this exploits racial stereotypes of the community, according to a Reuters report.
Manish Vij is an India American who has been very vocal in his criticism of what he sees as 7-Eleven's stereotyping of Indian Americans. "They are asking actual employees, many of whom are actually Indian Americans, to show up to work, walk through a door under a banner that mocks their ethnicity, and don a costume with a name tag that says Apu.' This is a very bizarre thing for a large corporation to be promoting."
7-Eleven maintains though, that it never intended to indulge in any sort of stereotyping and has no intention of ending the promotion prematurely. "It wasn't intended to be any specific character, it's across the whole spectrum of The Simpsons and they make fun of everybody across the board," Michael Jorgensen, 7-Eleven representatives in the New York area, told the news agency.
[Click here for CSP Daily News' coverage of the 7-Eleven Simpsons promotion and a slide show of the Chicago Kwik-E-Mart store.]
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