The Digital Sandwich Challenge

Sandwiches are so huge in the UK it’s almost cultural.

From sandwich bars to supermarkets and even pharmacies, when the clock strikes noon the entire country filters out to get their sandwich fix with every kind of bread, stuffing, and price available. Although a few years behind, Asian sandwich businesses have been steadily scratching away at the lunch time crowd; especially in Singapore and Hong Kong. More than anything, a 10 dollar sandwich no longer seems as inaccessible as it did a few years ago. We have food price inflation to thank for that!

Tanzy’s Sandwiches

Together with our partners at the Firestar Group, we’ve just launched Tanzy’s Well Stuffed Sandwiches; a proper old school sandwich bar serving juicy packed triangles at great prices. So the challenge is this – we are going to run a marketing campaign and a delivery mechanism based online; utilizing Twitter and Facebook to get people buyin’ them sandwiches!

The Digital Sandwich Challenge

Campaigns like this are becoming more and more standard in the West. Dunkin Donuts runs a popular lunch-time website, bakeries are now starting to tweet their fresh produce, and orders taken through Twitter is not unheard of. Is the Malaysian Market digitally mature enough for a sandwich store to successfully use Digital Media to boost sales and create a brand following? We think so.

So over the next 6 months we’ll be launching a series of funky tactical campaigns; we’ll write about how we do it, and publicize the results.

Why are we doing this? Aside from a lot of fun, we know that Malaysians are not digitally apathetic. There is still a widely held view amongst local brands that Malaysians are simply too uninterested and ‘digitally lazy’ to participate and share (a view that is already beginning to change), we beg to differ of course. The central premise is if we can make a sandwich store famous with Digital Media, then just about every SME out there can achieve the same goal.

Watch this space.

(and by the way if you want a sandwich in the meantime, come down to Phileo Promenade, Megan Avenue 1, off Ampang Park)