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"EGAD - SR Brainstorm - Winner Announced!"

Greetings once more - your favourite supplemental GAD fest is back again, taunting you with prizes you probably won't win like a carrot in front of a donkey. If you didn't love it, you wouldn't keep coming back.

Something a little different this time, in that this competition actually requires you to think a little rather than splatter your 'artistic' daubings on a banner :) What we'd like you to do is come up with some ways in which Special Reserve could promote themselves effectively. Bear in mind we haven't exactly got the backing of the Sultan of Brunei, we'd like you to drop us a few ideas on how best to get across the fact that Special Reserve are cheap, reliable and have a wide product range.

This could be improvements to ways we currently run things, new product ranges you think would appeal to our customers (bear in mind we currently sell rather a lot of stuff - see left sidestrip), new exciting ways to advertise our existing offers or just any ideas that have been floating round your head. Is there some range of products you just can't get hold of that would be perfect for us to sell? Let us know!

Post your ideas in this thread and we'll announce a winner at around the end of February, let's say the 27th. The best suggestions will win whatever prizes we give them, most probably yer standard £25/£50 GAD prize.

(And before anyone brings it up, yes we do think about this stuff ourselves, but we wanted to see what you lot think as well. So button it!)

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And the winner is..... phi11ip, for the following suggestion:

"Here's an idea, and if carried out correctly could be very beneficial. I've got a nice example too just to prove to you just how beneficial it is. www.staghosting.com was a free hosting service set up last year with the intention of boosting the ratings of a a few sites belonging to a company, one of these sites was www.actiondays.co.uk. Basically, unlike your free hosting, this hosting only offered hosting to domain names, you get 200MB disk space and 4 Gig bandwidth a month, you can upload from any connection unlike Freeola. So basically the company which has nothing to do with hosting has just set up a hosting site, sounds stupid doesn't it? What the requirements of this free hosting are though is that you must display a couple of small text links on your site, on mine you can see them on the links section on the side of the page. Google counts each link as a 'vote' and increases the pagerank of the site in question meaning that it shows up higher in searches, I see you've got 'cheap games' pretty much sorted but you don't show up anywhere when 'PS2 games' is typed in. If people were to display these text links on their sites it would soon make you appear high up on the search results. www.actiondays.co.uk was absolutely nowhere when it started, it had a low pagerank and didn't appear on searches. Have a look now though and you'll see that searching for 'corporate event' on Google.com returns the site as number 2 out of 6,500,000. Think about it. You've already got the hosting capabilities, all it would require is a server and someone to monitor the sites every now and then to make sure the links are there."

Congratulations and well done to everyone who entered.

FFF reminds me - you need some kind of daily content for people to check back for - kind of like something that a worker can do in five minutes at work to while away the time. A web comic? Flash cartoons? Whatever, but you've got to.

You could hire various tramps as advertising billboards.
Who can resist a tramp?

Also, a giant inflatable Tonty hovering above the world's key cities like some freakish Independence Day rip-off would work wonders.

You could try getting involved in some high-brow legal scandal, which would get you a lot of attention. Trust me on that one.

WOOO:
Have drive-through game-buying places on the side of your shops.
Yup.
Very efficient.

You could bribe the yellow pages into only having SR in there. It would be called the Yellow Page. A-ha.

Errr ...
Something about badgers.

Argh, must let ideas flow...

You know the GD flash games ideas you had a couple of months ago, and you said you was going to pt them through as a part of the site? my advice - add those flash games to the site. they'll bring in the schoolboy audience, as well as the 'I'm in work and don't want to work' audience. Both have huge amounts of disposal imcome and could easily while away the hours on Myst's space invaders clone, and, afterwards, realise they need a new game. where do they think of first? Special reserve.

You could also have a bif brother style endurance things in one of your stores, you know, to whip up publiciy in the locla and possibly national media - getting a few customers to see how long they could play a certain game for without stoppig - kinda like those 'touch the van' things in the 70's. link up 4 XBOXes with Halo, get 16 gamers and the last one to let go of the control pad wins a shopping spree in one of your stores, yes?

Another peice of advice that i give to you is to make upwire a more professional outfit, giving it the news as quick as other gaming sites like spong and gamesindustry.biz. I think that, if you invested the time and effort into it, and gave uwire a more sensible look, different to the rest of the site, it'd increase hits from gamers like me who wish to know all of the latest news, and, maybe, increase purchases.

Competitions like this should be advertised on the main page, and forum registration shouldn't be mandatory for it - you should be able to type your suggestion into a little box at the bottom of a news item, along with your e-mail address, to open it up to others who come to the site to buy games. They'd possibly check back more for these competitions, and thus would be more confident in the site.
For competitions like the banner contest, the above, of course, wouldn't work, but competitions should, of course, be advertised in upwire.

Expect more ideas from me shortly - my brain needs a rest.

Also (and here the FFF had a real idea):

Let people claim their reddies via the internet instead of only via post. Like put a special code on every reddy which you can type into the site to claim stuff.

Does this sound familiar?
Yes, I asked you about it before,

Sell:

Cheese,
Brides,
Wooden rocking chairs,
Blinds,
'Original' Tony artwork,
Plagues,
Night,
Tapestries,
Comedy money boxes,
Extra special limited edition plain A4 white paper.

And the world will be yours.
Then you can sell that as well.

mattrbute had a brainstorm - you could give away SR tee-shirts as free prizes, or offer them out to people who 'refer' others to the site. For instance, if I refered Peron 'A' and he bought F-Zero, i would get a free t-shirt. This would encourage people to get others to spend on the site, as well as giving free publicity to the site. You could also give away the T-Shirts for membership. They'd have to be snazzy, however.

Another way is to have a loyalty scheme, and scrap the damn reddy system. You could have one much like GAME's, where you get a credit card like thing, and, when you purchase something in store/on site, you get points, which can be redeemed either for games (Reddy style) or money off. Truthfully, this works - If I see the same prices in both Gamestation and GAME, I spend my money in game, as I know ity'll get me some money off in a few months time.

Special reserve Logo's is also another thing hich you could give away for signing up with the site - getting a little special reserve splat sent to your phone when you register. again, this would help spread word of mouth, especially amongst those internet freebie sites, and those who got the logo sent to their phone would most probably tell their mates.

talking of phones, you could add gaming text updates to your services, giving readers of upwire a chance to get the latest news sent to their phones, possibly for a small fee.

I'll just post this list now incase my PC freezes, which looks likely at the moment.

Expect another post in minuts.

i think a good products to sell would be sports equipment because i never found a decent place that would sell reasonable sports equipment that isnt on sale.

A good Way to advertise this would be (im my opinion) would be on google (as in sponsering them or somthing like that) because i always read the sponsers not nessecerally go on them but if people were looking for games then it would be right at the top of all the links. i found this site off google.

mattribute is filled with ideas.

good ideas.

but all of them are for pornos.

Indian Jones and the raiders of teh lost ass anyone?

i'll think up some ideas later.

or never.

I think the best way to advertise somewhere or something is buy T.V or the Radio.
You also could put up an ad on a billboard.