The year 2022 was no doubt was of our most action filled years with a lot of activities that included a Seedco Field Trip, Cruiseships Job Fairs, Business Showers, Suburb Chapter Meetings and others. We return to more activities in 2023 after a break and our first meeting was held in Mutare and was followed by the Carnival Cruise Liner Zbinites. The Carnival meeting was a historic one as it marked the first ever launch of our main staple food-sadza!

We will share the dates for the launch of the Business Showers as we seek to build on the 2022 momentum. We will also add business tours to Chiredzi and Honde Valley and be sure not to miss them.

Our South Africa Chapter will continue holding regular meetings and in Botswana we hope to hold our first forum meeting.

So keep checking the forum and do not be left out of the many events coming.

Is this some kind of a joke or the marketing guys at ABC Auctions are just trying to communicate that they can auction anything no matter how old it looks.

Is there really a market for this old “junk”? Or perhaps ABC Auctions marketing team is up to something?

Pictured above is a post on ABC Auctions’ official Facebook page.

What initially attracted my attention to the post was not the photo of the derelict stove, but the comments section. So I quickly browsed the comments section and chuckled all the way as l read through. When it comes to posting comments on Social media, Zimbabweans are talented. Finally, after reading the comments, I scrolled back up and tapped under the Facebook page name to confirm whether it was indeed their official page. Yep, it was indeed the ABC Auctions official FB, page. So why on earth would they post that old “useless” thing? Is this good for business? Then it suddenly hit me. It’s all about numbers! Generating traffic. Rigging the algorithm.

If you have a website that gets lots of traffic, you know that the more traffic it generates, the higher it will rank in the search engines. Likewise, the more engagement on your post the higher the views.

So that post generated lots of comments (negative, positive, hilarious, etc) and obviously attracted thousands of views as well. And I think the ABC Auctions marketing team has achieved its objective. Well done guys!

Over to you

• What “innovative” marketing strategies are you implementing in your communication to attract new customers?
• Do you think the ABC Auctions stunt marketing strategy can be adopted for your business?

Please note that if you want to go for stunt/shock marketing, be prepared to deal with any backlash from the audience.