Charmin and SitorSquat: nontraditional marketing at its finest

Ever find yourself on a road trip in the middle of nowheresville and needing a bathroom so bad that your teeth hurt? And let's face it (especially the ladies), we don't want just any bathroom, we want a clean bathroom. Well, no need to look futher than your phone, because the marketing geniuses at Charmin have signed on to sponsor a new app called SitorSquat that locates and records restrooms across the globe.

This is social networking at its finest...hunting for your hiney. SitorSquat greets you on the homepage with Charmin's brand image of a cute animated red Charmin bear wagging his behind that will make you laugh out loud. The app is a free download for iPhone and the BlackBerry, and allows users to locate bathrooms and also depends on users to post bathrooms and rate them.

So far, SitorSquat has logged more than 50,000 toilets in 10 countries, more than half a million unique visitors and 1,600 downloads of its mobile app. Charmin is capitalizing on the social media craze, and believes the continued growth of SitorSquat will bring growth to the brand.

According to the Charmin press release, this is the first time a toilet-paper brand has partnered with a downloadable mobile application. My prediction? Looks like Charmin is not only selling TP, they're TP'ing all over the market.

After the Fact

I made it back home to Texas late last night and have had a chance to ponder a bit about my first Market Research Event conference. In a nutshell, it was cool! I definitely enjoyed helping the IIR staff blog. It was similar to an ethnography project about market researchers, and as a moderator/qualitative consultant, that's my favorite thing to do!

I came to the conference wanting to learn more about the industry, including the wants, needs, desires, and frustrations of those in market research.

And I left the conference with a lot of learnings.

So, for the next several days I will be posting snippets of my what I learned (including photos and videos) onto this site as well as my own

blog.

And I hope you’ll join me in an online discussion— feel free to respond, ask questions, post comments. I think we NEED to start an online dialogue and continue to stay connected virtually. And this is the reason: One of my biggest takeaways is that the industry as a whole is wanting to understand more about “virtual connectedness.” In almost every workshop I attended, there was reference to it in some way: online communities, social networking, digital innovation, and the list goes on and on. How better to understand what many of our consumers want than to jump in and be a part of it!

Stay posted….

April Bell