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Newsletter #958: The “Something Extra” Issue

[Welcome back to the Damn, I Wish I’d Thought of That! newsletter. This is text of the great issue all of our email subscribers just received. Sign yourself up using the handy form on the right.]

Some little extras you expect, like continental breakfasts at your hotel and fortune cookies at a Chinese restaurant. But it’s the unexpected ones that help your stuff stand out and inspire your customers to tell their friends.

Here are some little extras you probably didn’t see coming:

1. A chocolate bar that comes with a piece to share
2. A novel that comes with an app
3. An album that comes with a video game
4. Check it out: Classic Books Annotated by Famous Authors

1. A chocolate bar that comes with a piece to share

Photo thanks to Adweek

Photo thanks to Adweek

Milka redesigned their chocolate bars for a limited time to have one missing chocolate square (don’t worry, they beefed up the remaining ones to make up for it). Inside the package was an opportunity for customers to send the missing chocolate square to someone else or to claim it for themselves. Using a code Milka provided on the package, they could enter a mailing address and write a sweet note with the single chocolate square.

The lesson: It’s always a good idea to give your customers an opportunity to share with others, especially when chocolate is involved.

Learn more: Adweek

2. A novel that comes with an app

Photo thanks to NPR

Photo thanks to NPR

To accompany her thriller novel Night Film, Marisha Pessl released a mobile app that gives her readers additional content. Why this is a great marketing tool: Marisha found a way to put something else in her customers’ hands besides the actual novel — something they carry around on their phones every day. So the next time they’re telling a friend about the novel they can say, “Here, look at the app that comes with it.”

The lesson: The more interesting stuff you give your customers, the more they have in their hands to show someone else.

Learn more: NPR

3. An album that comes with a video game

Photo thanks to The Silver Gymnasium

Photo thanks to The Silver Gymnasium

It’s hard to stand out in the music business, and album releases are often tainted (or boosted, depending on how you look at it) with leaks and pirating. So to add something unexpected to their new album and get more people interested, Okkervil River also created an 80’s-inspired video game online. It’s complete with characters that resemble band members and video game-soundtrack versions of songs from the album.

The lesson: For a simple game like this, it made their album much more remarkable than the other hundreds of indie stuff released every day.

Learn more: Engadget

4. Check it out: Classic Books Annotated by Famous Authors

Photo thanks to Falvorwire

Photo thanks to Flavorwire

Want to know what Herman Melville thought while reading Hamlet? See Vladimir Nabokov’s sketches in Kafka’s Metamorphosis? Or find out what Sylvia Plath underlined in The Great Gatsby?

Check it out: Flavorwire

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