Even though Mercado Libre is the market leader in Mexico with 48% of market share, it seems as if we’re in a constant popularity contest against Amazon. And while we’ve increased our Brand Power (from 22.8 on 2Q20 to 26.0 on 1Q21) and Top of mind (2.8% increase) over the past year, in comparison to our main competitor, we’re still losing.

Because of this, our main focus for 2021 has been to recruit new users for Mercado Lbre (and some of Amazon’s loyal customers) and drive traffic to our platform.

On July the 20th, Jeff Bezos, the richest person on Earth and Amazon’s Executive Chairman, launched into space for eleven minutes with a rocketship he dreamed up and funded, cool right?

Wrong. While Bezos selfishly flew to space and thanked his loyal customers for paying for the trip, we knew there was an opportunity for us to become more relatable to them.

We decided to take advantage of the media coverage and social buzz to launch a tweet with a promo” “free shipping for all Mercado Libre`s orders while Bezos is in space”. That means eleven minutes of Mercado Libre’s fast delivery experience for free.

For this idea to truly work, we needed to focus specifically on Amazon’s main audience in Mexico; 18-25 y/o adults. Not only was it a great chance to reach an audience that had weak connections with Mercado Libre, but also we knew they were keeping track of Bezos trip and the social conversation around it, which wasn’t 100% positive.

The topic was trending on social media on the week of the trip with both positive and negative opinions on the matter. On one hand, people were excited about his accomplishment, gaining a sense of admiration for him. But our true opportunity was rooted in the waves of criticism from a younger audience thinking the money spent could’ve been put to better use. Which is exactly what we did.

With a simple message we called for Amazon’s customers to experience Mercado Libre’s platform with free shipping, and no ego.

We launched a tweet targeting Amazon`s users and Mercado Libre`s non users inviting them to try Mercado Libre’s shipping, for free. We activated a countdown in Mercado Libre`s platform for eleven minutes, so when Jeff landed, the promo was over.

During the eleven minutes that the promo was activated, we reached 12,000 purchases, where 5,700 of them were made by Mercado Libre`s new users.

In the hour where the eleven minutes odyssey happened, the average of sales increased up to 500%.

But most importantly, while Jeff Bezos enjoyed his trip to space, Mercado Libre showed Bezos’ customers what they’re missing.