Is it possible to create an emotional connection with something as boring as a red brick?

After all a brick is a brick, right? A commodity, no matter what.

Well one company did: Acme Bricks.  True story.

Acme did it a few ways. (They have a decent marketing budget but it’s not huge for a 200MM company), but it’s all about creating a bond between the brand and the community.

• Lots of community exposure, donating bricks to large projects, which gets lots of press – they consider this cause-related marketing. 

• Connecting to well-known athletes like Troy Aikman (who already have that emotional connection). 

• They also have a 100 year plus history in the community and the way they took advantage of that was cool.  They could have just have the obligatory 100 year anniversary and slap the seal all over everything but they came up with the 100 year warranty. I think that was really smart because who else could be around long enough to offer such a warranty? And it sounds so much better than lifetime warranty.

Anyway, all of it is done with the intent of building a connection with the community.

The result is an overwhelming preference (84%) for acme when no other competitor has more than 10%. They also charge more for their bricks

The moral of the story: If you can create an emotional connection to a brick, you can do it with anything (even enterprise software).

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