Trend: Shop dropping

Shop-droppers are the opposite of shoplifters. Yes, they return purchased and paid merchandise to stores, secretly, but nonetheless noticeably to shopers. They plaster food-cans with new images and stack them in the shelf next to the carrots and peas. They hand-make imitations of Walmart-clothes and hang them back on the rack. They exchange the voices of talking Barbie Dolls. They are artists, activists and intellectuals. And it won’t take long until some marketers will use the art of shop-dropping for an innovative guerilla-campaign.

The original idea is to take some of the visual space back, that in our days is occupied by commercialism. Shop-droppers claim this commercial space for self expression and artistic use. They insert their altered products in public spaces of commerce and enforce therefore a new way of conception.

Because the barcodes and price tags are left intact, it is possible to purchase the shop-dropped objects, sometimes this happens even before they were discovered. In one case an employee even restocked the cans to a new aisle based on the barcode information. Of course there are security concerns, mainly regarding food objects.

Other examples are “The Free Words Project” or “The Barbie Liberation Front”. Free Words is a book which belongs to whoever finds it. The locations, mostly bookstores and libraries, are marked with a pink sticker. Generally the book can be found alphabetized under F-R-E-E.

The “Barbie Liberation Front” (BLO) returned altered action figure and Barbie dolls to the toy store shelves. Kids, whose parents bought those dolls, found themselves mildly shocked when discovering their Barbie yelling “Venegance is mine!” or their Action hero to lilt “Let’s plan our dream wedding!”

So far, no returns are reported, store owners could sell their products twice and parents and kids might have learned some lesson. No harm done! Marketers be aware.

The Free Words Project
The Barbie Liberation Front

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