Createlondon on tour - Peer to Peer Marketing Asia

Elephant Village - Laos

An exciting project for createlondon arose recently for an Elephant Sanctuary in Laos.

Background: Elephant Village rescues logging elephants from Laos and Thailand. Logging elephants are generally badly treated, malnutritioned and have to work very long hours. One elephant rescued at this village was fed MDMA (ecstasy) to make her work harder.

Elephants are extremely costly to keep eating 200kg a day and generally have to be leased from logging camps (forever) as the camps will not give them up, this raises the cost further.

createlondon were recruited as rainy season begins in 2 months time and this sees a huge percent of their market dwindle, producing hard times for the elephants and surrounding villages/communities that it helps to support.

Brief:

Our brief was to find a way to attract more customers in this season to keep the cash flow steady.

Background/Research:

This was new turf for createlondon, things move very slowly in Laos and the simplest of tasks from laminating 3 pieces of paper to setting up a new communication structure from the camp to head office can take weeks.

As Laos thrives off tourism, it is cluttered and over-populated with above the line advertisements. The key was to cut through this clutter.

Result:

createlondon produced a peer to peer marketing platform which utilised discounts and other perks in the form of high quality discount cards that can only be passed on from one traveler to the next. This worked alongside an updated website and the development of Twitter, facebook and blog mediums. These mediums also opened doors to other Elephant organisations, allowing knowledge to be shared and reviews such as from the 'Guardian' to be published and linked to.

The struggle was training Loas guides in the process and the use of social media with the language barrier being an obvious hinderence.

Elephant Village has already begun to see a return on their investment with cards bringing new guests to camp this week.

Please click here for an insight