Celebrate National Spaghetti Day

The Family of pasta has been commercially available since the 5th century according to historical texts, and I think we can safely assume that spaghetti Day wasn’t far behind. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t love spaghetti or more specifically pasta, though I’m sure there is a small percentage of those who don’t.

Check out more history of spaghetti and many different dishes made with it on Spaghetti At Wikipedia

Planning an event or series of events that celebrate Spaghetti Day together with your business can be a bit perplexing. Spaghetti is not something we usually think about when mapping out our marketing plan, I don’t think I’ve even heard of a  Flash Marketing Popup that featured spaghetti.

For those not in in the know when it comes to Popup Stores or Popup Marketing here is a short article on Forbes titled Retail’s Uberization Is Already Here: It’s Called Pop-Up Stores    And here is some info on catering spaghetti you can use for ideas before you call a catering company to partner with.

1. Plan on the Spaghetti Day running for 5 days with the last day be the official National Spaghetti Day. So from Monday to Friday your business will market itself around spaghetti.

2. This all happens at the beginning of the new year so I’m recommending that this becomes a give-a-way to those in need or those by themselves. This could happen in a different nursing home each day or a different church basement or even different schools.

3. Partner up with a catering company or a couple of catering companies and come to some sort of agreement on what percentage of their costs you’ll cover. Maybe you cover the food costs or just the labor costs. It’s important that they bear some of the cost since they also will benefit greatly in the marketing success. But it is your marketing so if you want most of the control you’ll need to do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to cash etc.

4. You’ll want to connect with all local media and online social media at least a month before the launch and the earlier you connect the more value you’ll get.

The story you’ll be telling both the media and any catering business you hope to partner with is that over the course of 5 days you are setting up one or two Spaghetti Day Giveaways. Each popup will be a colorful booth that serves food to anyone who shows up. To make it workable you’ll need to limit the hours it serves food.

Each popup will promote the food, the giveaway and your business at the same time. Lots of great graphics on the booth and hanging banners at entrances and exits etc.

Because it is the beginning of the new year you can promote the power of giving within each businesses community and how powerful the message is to all involved as well as the larger community and surrounding communities.

This becomes a multi pronged marketing event that pays off to not only those receiving but also to the businesses and media involved. If done with loads of enthusiasm it will build visibility, marketing chops and community recognition.

This particular marketing campaign also lends itself to being repeated expanded each year. Think about having is intergrated into all your local locations from 2 to 200 hundred small business branches. And think about also inviting 2 or 3 other business to join as it grows, even competitors.