Creative Marketing: 7-Elevens become Simpsons 'Kwik-E-Marts' Posted Jul-1-2007
Life Imitates Art. D'oh!
Simpsons fans will love this: In anticipation for the debut of "The Simpsons Movie" on July 27, a dozen 7-Eleven stores have been turned into fictional Kwik-E-Marts, complete with products once only found in animated TV Land. According to the news report on Yahoo!:

"Over the weekend, 7-Eleven Inc. turned a dozen stores into Kwik-E-Marts, the fictional convenience stores of "The Simpsons" fame, in the latest example of marketers making life imitate art.

Those stores and most of the 6,000-plus other 7-Elevens in North America will sell items that until now existed only on television: Buzz Cola, KrustyO's cereal and Squishees, the slushy drink knockoff of Slurpees.

It's all part of a campaign to hype the July 27 opening of "The Simpsons Movie," the big-screen debut for the long-running television cartoon, which loves to lampoon 7-Eleven as a store that sells all kinds of unhealthy snacks and is run by a man with a thick Indian accent."

It's interesting to see how marketers use their creativity and "outside the box" thinking in pre-movie promotions like this. This clever marketing ploy goes way beyond the Happy Meal toy and brings a fun sense creative play into the real world.

And that's probably not as far-fetched as it might seem, especially for Simpsons fans who have long adapted parts of the animated series into their own lives such as by supplementing their vocabularies with words like "yoink", "Ha-Ha", "D'oh", and the evil-growling "Excellent".

Can't wait to see the movie? Watch some trailers at the Official Simpsons Movie Web site. •

© 2007 Chris Dunmire www.chrisdunmire.com. All rights reserved.