Amy Cohen Efron shares her surprising discovery of one of the best examples in ASL marketing.

Amy demonstrates a promotional give-away, the pack-of-6 SONIC® Wacky Pack® Kids’ Meal toy that was distributed through SONIC® Drive-In Restaurants in 2006.

You may wonder what is SONIC®? SONIC® Drive-In Restaurants, which is the nation’s largest drive-in chain serving hamburgers, sandwiches, Coney dogs, and famous Slushes to customers from coast to coast and in Mexico. Today, SONIC has more than 3,000 Drive-Ins. SONIC® offers Wacky Pack® Kids’ Meal which comes with a meal and free promotional fun ‘toy’.

Here is a pack of 6 SONIC’s® Wacky Pack® Kids’ Meal “Speak in Sign Language” promotional give-way set. Look at these pictures below that explains about American Sign Language, and it is an excellent way to promote ASL!

This set has six card decks, which includes information about American Sign Language, ASL alphabet and signs! Each deck comes with their topics and they are:

Deck #1: Numbers & Colors
Deck #2: Simple Phrases
Deck #3: Animals
Deck #4: People
Deck #5: Food
Deck #6: Feelings & Emotions

What is really surprising to me that this promotion give-way was distributed in 2006, which was so recent. Honestly, I have never heard or read about this. It was only two years ago!

I decided to check online to find out bit more about this SONIC® Wacky Pack® “Speak In Sign Language” promotion, and I came across with a very few links about this wonderful marketing tool.

There is one link from Kansas School for the Deaf’s monthly school newsletter, Kansas Contact published in April 2006. Please go to the link that takes you to the PDF file: Kansas Contact : Volume 5, Issue 3. Go to page 3. You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open this file.

In this article, Kansas School for the Deaf was approached by one company called C3: Creative Consumer Concepts, which is an integrated brand marketing agency. C3 works with SONIC® Drive-In Restaurants on their promotional Wacky Pack® give-away. The designers of C3 contacted staff members at KSD because they wanted to be sure that the individual signs they were designing were correct.

Here is another link that I discovered that is related to this promotion, Courtney Campbell who is
lead designer/illustrator on the SONIC/Wacky Pack account, and she has 5+ years of professional experience with graphic design. With this involvement with this promotional project, Ms. Campbell received a national recognition of SONIC Speak in Sign Language premiums within the deaf/education community in 2006. See the link: Courtney Campbell’s resume

I am very IMPRESSED with this amazing partnership between KSD and C3 representing a large restaurant company! Kudos to Kansas School for the Deaf! Hand waves for your successful partnership. Thank you Courtney Campbell and C3 company made a very wise decision to contact KSD for consultation, thus having this successful promotion marketing American Sign Language to the mass audience!

Now, that is one of the successful marketing techniques using American Sign Language.

What’s next? McDonald’s® Happy Meal® promotion or Burger King’s® Kids Meal promotion?

Think about it.