- 15 June, 2005 -

Manchu WOK's Chris Yu showcases a new ad campaign to target customers. The research for the campaign came from looking through people's garbage. Sitting in parked cars, peeking in people's recycling bins at 6 a.m. and writing down their addresses - no, it's not some new form of stalking, it's marketing. When Chinese-style fast food seller Manchu WOK wanted to drum up customer traffic at their store at Steeles Avenue West and Dufferin Street last April, they tried a new idea: find out who their target customers are in the most tell-tale way possible - by looking through their garbage. Here's how it worked: every day at 6 a.m., a team of five people hopped into a car and drove around the Steeles-Dufferin neighbourhood, noting which houses had pizza boxes and take-out bags in their recycling bins. Later in the same day, a team member returned to each target house with a pizza box bearing the Manchu WOK name and carrying coupons and fortune cookies. There was no sale - only the hope that customers would give Manchu WOK a try. Team member Chris Yu admits the idea made him nervous at first, but things ran smoothly once he realized people responded well to the novel approach. "At first it was weird to wake up early to drive down the street, writing things down," Yu said. "I didn't know what reaction to expect, but the first couple of times were really positive, so it gave me confidence." The approach worked almost too well, since Yu says some people mistook him for a wayward delivery boy and insisted they hadn't ordered anything. "We had people saying, 'Are you sure it wasn't ordered next door?' They thought we were actually delivering food," Yu said. Jokes aside, the campaign has been hugely effective - whereas a standard direct marketing campaign averages a one to three per cent increase to store traffic, Manchu WOK's pizza box campaign scored a 30 per cent increase in store traffic and a 34 per cent increase in sales for the six weeks the campaign ran. Julie Haslam, Manchu WOK's marketing manager, says Manchu WOK is expanding the campaign to its Etobicoke and Newmarket stores soon, and plans to include the program in a start-up kit for franchises. Haslam believes the campaign's success stems largely from its uniqueness. "People are caught off guard by it. They're looking for something other than the traditional junk mail piece - they're inundated with that," Haslam says. As for worries about privacy, Haslam says the campaign was harmless, and that the focus was only on taking note of what people had already put out in the street, for full public view - their recyclables. "It's not intrusive on the customer at all. We're not going through garbage bins or anything like that," she said. Rafael Brusilow for Metro Toronto

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