For a recent family gathering, my wife cooked a whole turkey. And like with many families, this means plenty of turkey leftovers.
And there is no shortage of sources on what meals can now be prepared with the tons of turkey leftovers. One of my personal favorites, because of its ease to make is a recipe for turkey potpie.
The recipe comes from an instant yeast company and the part that applies to marketing is this: While it calls for other ingredients, it attaches brand names to those other products.
For example, it is not just put in one-half tablespoon of parsley flakes, its use "Joe Blow" parsley flakes. It's not grease the pan with cooking spray, it said to use "ABC" cooking spray, and also use "XYZ Flour" and so forth.
There are all of these little bits of brand awareness in a rather easy and short recipe.
As the MasterCard commercial goes, such bits of cross branding are "priceless." Speaking of MasterCard, I recently came across one of their older commercials, which first ran in Super Bowl XXXIV in 2005.
This is another great example of cross branding. The concept is a bunch of animated product spokespeople sitting down together for dinner. The characters included Chef Boyardee, Charlie the Tuna, the Pillsbury Doughboy, Count Chocula, Jovny the Vlasic Pickles stork, the Morton Salt girl, the Jolly Green Giant, Mr. Peanut from Planters Peanuts, the Gorton's fisherman, and Mr. Clean.
The take home for mortgage originators: consider such cross-branding arrangements, not only with your real estate referral partners, but such other sources as your local gas station, your local pizza parlor, your local tailor and more. People wiser than I have suggested doing this concept over the years, but recent events have driven home the point on how easy it is to accomplish.
