I love ice cream but I have never seen human breast milk flavoured ice cream! A London ice cream store just launched breast milk ice cream called "Baby Gaga". The price of this ice cream is at £14, and now this ice cream is sold out!
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The "Baby Gaga" targets new moms because many moms use formula milk instead of breast milk. The store hopes that after they tried this delicious ice cream, more moms will start using breast milk for their babies. Actually, there are quite a few men were trying this special ice cream.
The store is paying £15 for every 10 ounces of breast milk donated by 15 women. "All milk was screened in line with hospital/blood donor requirements," said by the store on their Facebook page, and they are also saying that the ice cream is "pure, organic, and natural".
Their website http://www.theicecreamists.com is a one page flash site. I have never seen a website of a ice cream brand could look so unique - looks like a website of a musician. If there is no this background picture with a person licking the spoon , I would think that i was on a wrong site. Clearly, this web site presents their OVP "lick your addiction" - their ice cream is addictive, and unique.
Fans on their Facebook page is increasing rapidly - 10 people just joined the page during the time I'm writing this blog. To me, the "Baby Gaga" is a successful marketing move to this only one and a half years old store.
A few days ago, I was looking at London Drugs weekly flyer, this page made me stay for a few minutes:
I was not interested in the vitamins or fish oil but the QR Codes. I haven't seen QR Codes being used very often in Canada, even thought this little square barcode has been out for a while.
At the right hand side, there is an instruction on how to use the QR Code, and it specially mentioned a QR Code scanner - Scanlife. Why London Drugs put "download Scanlife from the app store" as the first step of the instruction? Maybe they assumed that customers are new to this way of internet searching and tried to provide convenience? Maybe this app has high reputation? With these questions, I searched Scanlife in iTunes store, I found this app actually does not have a high rating. From user comments, many of the users downloaded this app because they saw London Drugs flyer! However, this app is not functioning very well.
I'm very interested in the QR Codes usage in Canada. However, QR Codes is not wide-spread in Canada. As said by Erica Glasier, QRe8.com, "There are no barriers in Canada from a technology point of view. Only from a user experience point of view."
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I also did some research on the usage of QR Codes in other countries.
Japan
QR Codes was created by Toyota subsidiary Denso-Wave in 1994. In the origin of QR Codes, Japanese marketers use QR Codes everywhere: food packaging, store advertisement, magazines, T-shirt tags, even on tombstones!
Below is the personal experience of blogger Cliffano Subagio. He took a video of how Japanese people looking at a Disney ad with QR Codes.
As early as in 2006, Japanese mobile phone has integrated digital wallet, QR Code scanner, and TV together. Japanese customers can pay bills and transit, search the internet, or watch TV on the go.
Taiwan
It's Valentine's time, Chunghwa Post of Taiwan released new heart shaped stamps with QR Codes in the middle. These QR codes include secret messages "I Love You!" and "Happy Valentine's Day!". (I tried to scan them with iPhone app Bakodo, and the message did show up!)
The purpose of these stamps is to increase the usage of mail letters. They hope people can write each other letters with the special stamps on.
