Vacation’s viral referral program

Category
Beauty, cosmetic & personal care

Founded
2021

In 2021, Poolsuite (formerly Poolside FM), the old-school ‘ultra-summer internet radio station’, launched a DTC sunscreen company - Vacation.

The new brand has similar retro vibes and was crafted to transport users to the summer of 1986, Miami, Florida.

Similar to when launching Poolside, the three co-founders didn’t have a big budget to work with, so they had to get creative with kickstarting the growth of their new brand.

That’s why they picked virality and word of mouth as the main distribution channel. But it wasn’t a regular, boring ‘invite a friend and get $10 off’ referral scheme.

Instead, in their pre-launch campaign, they invited users to claim honorary Vacation Inc. job titles and become ‘a part of the company’.

(s/o to a fellow Trends member Vincent Hiroz for spotting this campaign!)

Not only could users get a fun virtual business card but also some insider perks.

I was proudly appointed their new Daiquiri Jello Shot Strategist.

As you can imagine, people started sharing their business cards on social media to boast about their ridiculous new job titles at Vacation Inc.

Then, others who saw these posts also wanted to get their business cards, so they went to Vacation’s website and claimed their own titles, and shared them on social media, keeping the viral loop spinning.

As a result, tens of thousands of users became Vacation’s new unofficial employees, leaving their contact details that Vacation would later use to promote their ‘leisure enhancing’ sunscreen.

OK, let’s try to understand why this tactic was so successful.

If you’re familiar with Cialdini’s classic principles of influence, you’ll likely spot three of them in Vacation’s campaign:

• Reciprocity. Vacation reversed the regular referral program reward order. Usually, users have to put in the work first (send referral links to their friends) to get a reward (referral bonus). Here, they get the reward first (job title and a business card) which makes them want to return the favor by sharing their business cards and referral links with others.
• Liking. The humor and uniqueness of the Vacation brand are appealing to a certain group of people. The reward is personalized and makes users feel a part of the brand and community that Vacation creates, which is emphasized by the copy on the success screen: “You’re on the team. One of us!”. And we humans are more likely to be persuaded by individuals and companies we like.
• Scarcity. To trigger the initial virality, the number of available job titles was limited to 1,000 to incentivize users to take action. After the campaign took off, this was no longer needed though. Vacation lifted the cap to keep the viral loop going.

Another aspect that increased the virality was that the campaign was original and creative, something people probably never encountered on the Internet before. As they wanted to be perceived by others as funny, theyshared the content on their social profiles.

Is this tactic replicable?

I would argue it is. However, its performance will surely decay a lot as the novelty effect fades with more companies using it.

So if you feel like your current job title is boring, go get a fancier one on vacation.inc.