Harry is everywhere nowadays. His latest movie was released last week, and the last in the series of books will be released this Friday night. At some point I'll probably go into a lot more detail around the marketing of this product/series, but for now, one thing that struck me was the marketing that Barnes & Noble is doing around the book launch.
On Monday I got an e-mail invite telling me it was "5 days to Harry". Not just your average "come to http://www.bn.com/ to buy the book" piece of spam, it was first an invite to one of their stores for Friday's Harry Potter's Midnight Magic party. B & N is doing a great job of utilizing every communication channel available to build customer loyalty and generate revenue. Even if you can't attend a party, you can watch a live video stream of the party from NYC. I'm a big fan of Amazon.com, but a well-executed multi-channel marketing campaign by a company with a brick & mortar presence can be so much more powerful than a pure online-only eTailer. They may have been slow to the online game, but they are now leveraging all their assets to create a competive advantage both online and offline.
UPDATE: A recent study by Carlson Marketing states that Barnes & Noble has one of the highest levels of customer relationship strength.
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