Instead of offering low prices in household appliances on International Women’s Day, we did exactly the opposite. We raised their value into ludicrous numbers. This was our Crazy Prices campaign.

We first started our communication as a traditional sale campaign (radios, magazine ads, outdoor and even e-commerce) and, when people reacted badly against our prices, we unveiled the campaign message on march the 8th:

Prices are not crazy. Crazy is thinking a household appliance is a nice gift to give to a woman.

Instead, we offered a huge variety of awesome gifts for people to buy.

Our campaign started the week before International Women’s Day. We communicated in our traditional media: newspaper, radio, social networks. But this time, the offer ads were different: the prices of the products were unbelievable and people reacted to this.

On March the 8th, we unveiled the Crazy Prices campaign was unveiled and we used the same media to tell people we raised prices because we didn’t want anybody to consider a household appliance as a gift.

Newspapers, social media and even feminist’s spokeswomen supported us.

The campaign was quoted by Argentinian most important media and many feminist’s spokeswomen as Debora Pérez Volpin and Maju Lozano supported us in their twitter accounts.

Even some articles said that this campaign “challenged the role of woman in retail stores”.

The most simple and powerful result was that no one bought any household appliance on International Women’s Day. And that’s a new record.

The Crazy Prices campaign took Minicuotas Ribeiro’s slogan to life: we put people first. We put people (in this case women and their fight for gender equality) first, as the campaign tried to give the correct message instead of generating profits.

In this order, the campaign had very low budget. The only thing we did was changing prices in every media we had for traditional sale communications (including e-commerce) and we promoted them as we usually do, with the same budget we had for a common Tuesday offer.

This, certainly, made people as crazy as our prices.

As a retailer, we are aware of the huge number of stores that still put to offer household appliances on International Women’s Day. They use this important day as an opportunity of increasing sales with the wrong message.

Consumers still take advantage of these offers because of the low prices of the articles and don’t really care if they are doing the correct thing. They just buy an iron as a nice gift.

As a retail store, we wanted to do something real about this situation and be consistent with our slogan: we put people first. So, we sacrificed profits in order to give the correct message.

We did this in every media we usually do: newspapers, radios, social networks.

In Argentina, many retailers are still offering household appliances as amazing gifts for women. Especially on International Women’s Day.

These retrograde messages may help increasing profits but they are hindering gender equality fight.

That’s why in Minicuotas Ribeiro we wanted to develop a different and real campaign for International Women’s Day offers.

Our objectives were to apply a real change in sexist consumer habits and to create the first marketing campaign that puts a good message above profits.