Ugly Grill Contest

March 5, 2014

Ugly Grill Contest

“Ugly Grill Contest” – Time to Plan!

The Polar Vortex

I’ve been in Dallas this week and had thought that with their 80 degree temperatures last week that they would be ready for the annual “Grilling Season” kickoff here in Texas. Landing at DFW I could see snow on the approach to landing. High temperatures have been in the 40 to 50 degree levels. Still a little chili here. Winter’s not over yet.

Today I head north to Omaha for a workshop at Affiliated Foods Midwest’s Spring Food Show through Saturday evening and the forecast is for a high of 33 degrees tomorrow in Omaha. Winter’s not over yet.

I called my wife and back home in Phoenix, the 10 day forecast is for 80 degrees + weather. So, Winter is officially over and it’s time to get ready for grilling season.

Earlier today I heard something really interesting from friend and Affiliated Foods Midwest business associate Robert Rothove. Robert lives in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin where the HIGH temperature this past month has been in the 20 degree range, occasionally peaking in the low 30’s.

Robert tells me that his customers stores seemed to enjoy the “business bump” caused by the “Polar Vortex” when it first arrived…..but the prolonged frigid weather has taken it’s toll on consumers and there is a really bad case of “cabin fever” with consumers eagerly awaiting warmer weather so they can kick off the grilling season- finally.

Robert predicts that all the charcoal that is sitting around today will disappear very quickly as consumers jump at the opportunity to put the “Polar Vortex” in their rear view mirror and start grilling when there is a bit of a break in the cold weather. Just a couple of warmer days will kickstart the grilling season.

Sales will soon jump as soon as there’s a reason to get outdoors and fire up the grill.

Time to Plan Your “Ugly Grill” Contest

What’s an “Ugly Grill” Contest?

Start the process with a BBQ display with a grill in your store lobby. Show your customer the really nice grill and accessories they can win if their “Ugly Grill” photo is chosen as the best. Even better, include a BBQ package from your meat department – ribs, steaks, chops and ground beef.

Have some other prizes for runner’s up your contest. It’s a great display idea that allows you to promote Spring season BBQ kickoffs and in 4 to 6 weeks you give-away the grill that has been on display.

Explain the timeline of your contest – we suggest 30 days or less. All photos need to be emailed to you along with any accompanying explanation pertaining to the history of the grill.

Ask your customers to submit a photo of their “ugly” grill. Do so in an upcoming weekly ad, on your website, on your FaceBook page, with Tweets and on your in store signage. If you’d like, just ask any of our Customer Service Representatives (Michael, Nick or Paul) to design an eBlast announcing your “Ugly Grill” contest and encourage customers to submit photos to win the contest.

When you accumulate your pile of photo entries, select 4 of your “finalists”. You’ll need to have a PDF page with your 4 finalist photos along with nicknames for each of the four finalists. Our CSR’s can work with you to get the PDF page posted on your website. You may want to put have us design a homepage slide for your slide show announcing your contest and we can provide a “click here” link to the photos of the 4 finalists.

You also need to post these photos on your Facebook site.

On the home page of your website just ask any of our CSR’s to place a voting poll for the four finalist. The poll will be on your website for any period of time you wish. Your customers can now vote for their favorite among the 4 finalists.

If you haven’t used a homepage poll on your website this is a great tool to get customer involvement. Our fee to post a “real time” poll on your website is only $5 (yes, just five bucks). Your website viewers can place their vote for their favorite “ugly grill” just once a day.

In “real time” your website viewers can see which of the 4 finalist has the highest number of votes. Our customer poll program only permits 1 vote per viewer per day so they have to come back each day to place another vote for their favorite. It’s likely that the 4 finalist will be encouraging all their friends and relatives to visit your website to place a daily vote for their “ugly grill” entry.

Below is an example of a customer poll —— we’d just plug in the names of the top 4 finalist in a similar poll on your home page:

Idea: We’d set up a poll like this ($5 fee) for real time voting on your home page. You’d just give us the names of the top 4 finalist and we can start the voting module on your homepage.

Your FaceBook Page, Twitter Updates

It’s really important to provide updates on your FaceBook page with the photos of the finalists and the “leader board” encouraging customers to visit your homepage (provide a website link to your homepage).

You can also “hype” the meat bundle package you’re awarding as well.

On Twitter, you can tweet every few days on the updated vote count and encourage followers to go to your website to vote each day.

Looking for more ideas on rules and promotional ideas?

Johnsonville has one of the best “Ugly Grill” competitions – click on the logo below to see their website gallery of photos: