A Retrospective: The signage thing.

Years ago, I thought doing this little stunt would be a good idea. Now I think it was a great idea.

I counterfeited a bunch of street signs, snuck out on the night before Good Friday and inserted them on the main entryway to the southwest region.

When heading south in WA, there’s one road down. About 2 hours south of Perth, you hit a roundabout. If you turn right, in 1km, you hit Bunbury’s CBD, epic beaches and admittedly, at the time, a few businesses of my own. If you turn left - in another hour, you hit Dunsborough and Margret River.

One million people a year turn left, and 100k turn right. (Based on Govt tourism data from ABS)

The problem at the time was that there wasn’t any marketing for the area; worse, there wasn’t a street sign that told tourists to turn right.

I ran this experiment and monitored the increase of tourists to the town over that Friday. The city was buzzing, and through some rough back of the napkin calculations, it injected a further $250k income to local businesses on that day (compared to historical data from 10 select business’s whom I asked for rounded figures to see if the stunt worked).

After this video was released, and after a few visits from the police… a sign was erected.

Was it the right way to get a sign put in? No.
Did it work? Yes.

J