Sell Xbox at Your Hosted Home Parties
Microsoft is recruiting women to sell its Xbox at social gatherings.
You have probably been to those “tupperware parties” where products for everything from sexy lingerie to cookware have been shown and sold.
Now, Microsoft is taking advantage of these age-old parties to promote Xbox 360. Sound a little weird, but does it?
From a report in Ft Myers, FL-based news-press.com (a Gannett (GCI) property) suggests.
On a recent Saturday, about 1,000 women across the country moonlighted as marketers for Microsoft’s newest Xbox services.
House cleaners, hairdressers, guidance counselors and IT technicians got a $150 pack of Xbox freebies for opening their homes to at least 10 friends or relatives…
Microsoft signed up Maldonado and the others to drum up interest among women like them in the services and the newest Xbox console, whose price was cut in the fall to $199.
“We’ve sold 20 million consoles to date globally since we launched three years ago,” says Heather Snavely, Microsoft’s director of interactive entertainment business global platforms. “In order to get to the next 20 million, we need to get a new audience of women and teens. We’re going after them in ways that are different than ways we’ve done before.”
Well, who would have thought?
Yet, the trend of using home parties to sell products among friends has seen greater success recently. Many more companies are embracing this strategy to expand their sales force.
And what do women get for becoming Microsoft’s ad-hoc sales force, and where does Microsoft find them?
They got an Xbox party pack of freebies that included microwaveable popcorn, Xbox trivia game “Scene It? Box Office Smash,” an Xbox universal media remote control, a three-month subscription to Xbox Live, and 1,600 Xbox Live points (used for game, movie and TV show purchases).
Xbox found women including Maldonado and Chicago-area resident Danielle Jamil through a service called House Party, which sets up home parties for marketers. House Party has a database of 100,000 names of people who have provided a profile of personal information and who want to be “brand advocates.” The advocates host a preplanned party to show off the marketer’s brand to their friends.
I personally think this is a brilliant idea.
What could be more fun than hosting a party, playing a game, and making some small change at the same time?