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Top 5 Random Acts of Kindness Campaigns
Everyone has probably heard the phrase “a random act of kindness”. At face value, it describes something fairly self-explanatory; a selfless act performed by someone who wants to help or cheer up another individual. As a concept, it even has its own week in the event calendar, with Random Acts of Kindness Week occurring from the 9th to the 15th of February.
Recently however, it’s become something of a marketing trend. While the likes of augmented reality, drone advertising or projection mapping are using the latest technology to promote brands and products, campaigns based around Random Acts of Kindness are all about spreading some love in the simplest way possible. One of the earliest examples was Interflora’s Twitter campaign in 2010, when it cheered up people who were complaining about having a bad day on social media by surprising them with a bunch of flowers. It proved particularly popular with airlines, a number of them, including KLM, Virgin Atlantic USA and Spanair, creating their own campaigns to surprise travellers in airports across the globe.
Here are our five favourite examples of brands performing their own selfless acts of kindness;
On New Year’s Day 2015, San Francisco-based Airbnb gave 100,000 of its customers across the world the equivalent of $10 in their own currency. The only proviso was that they used it to perform a “unique act of kindness”. The #OneLessStranger campaign encouraged people to plant seeds in community gardens, buy supplies for community centres or help to feed people in need and then share the photos and videos of these random acts of kindness on social media.
Australian online wine retailer, Vinomofo, encouraged people to nominate individuals or groups that were doing something awesome for their community. On the last Friday of every month, it chose a selection of nominees to receive a ‘Vinobomb’; a party box containing 6 of their finest wines.
Image source; Vinomofo
As part of its broader ‘Choose Happiness’ campaign, Coca-Cola created “Wish Booths” across Dubai which could be activated with Coca-Cola bottle caps. The #WishUponACoke campaign recognised that a large number of UAE residents were immigrant workers, so it encouraged them to make a wish for their families back home. The brand then picked four random wishes and helped the families involved to make them come true, from replacing a damaged roof to irrigating farmland. You can see the stories in full below.
As part of its Christmas campaign in 2014, Marks & Spencer started secretly committing acts of kindness under the guise of @TheTwoFairies. Having listened to people on social media, it visited homes, school and offices, delivering gifts with handwritten calling cards featuring, #FollowTheFairies. When the TV advert launched, it was revealed that M&S was behind the stunts, staging two larger events where the retailer made it magically snow on Britain’s most southerly school and made two fairies fly over the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle, thanks to a couple of drones.
Straight after its Super Bowl TV campaign, McDonald’s introduced its ‘Pay with Lovin’ campaign. A designated number of random customers in stores across America were allowed to have their food for free if they performed a simple act of kindness, like hugging someone, dancing, calling their mother or giving the server a fist bump.
What’s Next?
We can expect to see more and more brands ally themselves with Random Acts of Kindness Week in the future, especially if they see results like Starbucks did for its #TweetACoffee campaign, where people were encouraged to buy their friends a coffee using Twitter. A research firm found that more than 27,000 fans used @tweetacoffee, with 34% buying multiple gift cards and 32% of the purchases occurring on the first day. They received $180,000 in purchases and gained 54,000 Twitter profiles and customer IDs!
So keep an eye out for people being selflessly kind in February or better yet, don’t wait until then and go and commit your own random act of kindness today!
By Ceri Gravelle, Managing Director at eventeem
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