The Origin of Come Round
The seeds for Come Round can probably be traced back to a little-known book called “Fun For Free” which our founder, Giles Harris, was fascinated with in his childhood. The concept of organisations sending out products and samples to kids to try out at home was too good to resist for Giles. Fast forward to him working as a lawyer in the music industry and hearing the challenges for the industry to be more “direct to consumer” and that is where the idea for Come Round was born in 2009. Marketing to people in their homes – what could be more direct than that?
Our first campaigns were for the music industry; we were popular among teenagers running album launch campaigns for the likes of Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and Usher. Never wanting to put all our eggs in one musical basket, we quickly grew (through word-of-mouth ironically) into other areas of entertainment and soon found ourselves running Xbox and PlayStation campaigns for Just Dance, DVD campaigns for Doctor Who and book campaigns for Pan Macmillan. We ran (and still run) a lot of these campaigns as Party Marketing campaigns, a concept we devised when we set up Come Round having read with interest research from Nobel prize-winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, that people are more receptive to being marketed to when in a fun relaxed environment. Not many could resist the lure of hosting an official Justin Bieber album launch party – not only getting your hands on his new album before anyone else together with an awesome party pack – but also getting to chance to meet the Bieber himself (awarded to the party who posted the best photo).
