Who hasn't strolled into a store or shopping mall on a weekend shopping spree only to run into some company promotion team? Add some freebies to the mix and you have a guaranteed, although small scale, marketing success.

Except that a HP promotion at a Best Buy store last weekend in San Jose didn't feature some marketing type, but no other than the company's media shy chief executive Mark Hurd.

30 Aug 2006

The visit was part of a regular "meet the engineer" kind of thing where HP employees volunteer to visit retail stores on weekends and talk about the technology that they create.

It shows the human face behind the corporate logo, allows HP workers to stay in touch with their customers and the store gets some free promotion. It could come straight from the marketing best practices handbook.

Mark Hurd had insisted that he too would like to meet some customers in the wild. And so it happened that unsuspecting Best Buy shoppers looking for free goodies were greeted by the HP boss last Saturday.

Hurd explains why you're a nobody on Myspace if you don't have a HP digital camera.

technorati tags: hp, mark+hurd, hurd, best+buy, marketing