I am pleased to participate in the STB Creative Writing Prompt 20, I invite @ulisesdelailiada to participate.
Margaret had become immersed in the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles traffic. Her gaze was resting on the inclement summer sun, when, in the distance, she glimpsed several girls posing almost naked with coffee beans covering their bodies. "But what is this?" she thought, as she tried to make out the brand name of the coffee company that for years had belonged to her family for.
Desperate, she began to call her grandmother, who did not answer. She managed to park her car near that square and witnessed how several conservative people protested against the campaign. " GET OUT OF HERE DEMON'S DAUGHTERS!" a group of religious people shouted in unison. Television cameras and social networks are flooded with photos and images of The Sunrise Coffee® campaign.
Her grandmother has hired a marketing firm to save the company from a huge loss. Thousands of tons of beans had been left behind in their barns and now the company was in debt, losing customers and dropping sales. "Grandma, what have you done," Margaret says, managing to appease her anger, "save the company," she rolls her eyes and sighs in exasperation and notices something: a river of coffee is running through the famous downtown fountain.
The water was brown and looked like a sea of cold coffee, "grandma, I know we want to save the company, but this strategy is absurd and exceeds any limit", Margaret caressed the river of coffee running in front of her eyes, "Margaret, everybody is talking about us, surely we are going to have to pay a fine to the city council, but, tomorrow all our coffee shops of Sunrise Coffee® will be on the front page of all the newspapers", Bia sits in her office and enjoys the news while smiling.
A group of young people invades the square while throwing coffee beans through the air. It leaves a delicious aroma in the air, Margaret feels it and enjoys it as if it were her first time. Those beans might be old, but her coffee had no competition. "Grandma, this is too risky, too avant-garde and it could hurt us a lot, we'd better stop this", but while she was talking to her grandmother, a blimp appeared in the sky. A giant Sunrise Coffee® logo glowed in the sun's rays.
Then, small pieces of paper began to fall from the sky. A large number of people started to get out of their cars and out of their jobs to find out what it was that was being dropped from the blimp. "Stop the drama, dear. They're just coupons. For every coupon, you'll get a free cup of coffee. Whatever presentation and flavor they want, once they get a free coffee that we were going to lose anyway, they're going to buy something else" Margaret was annoyed by Bia's assurance.
"Grandma, this is real life, they're going to cancel us on social media," but Bia was quick to refute her granddaughter, "I wouldn't cancel on someone who gives me a free cup of coffee." Tired Margaret hung up her phone and drove to the company. Earlier she passed by several of those branches and was surprised to see that the stores that once stood empty were now filled with people.
The hashtag #coffeenaked was a trending topic on Twitter and one of the most followed trends on TikTok. Many praised the brand for its aggressive advertising campaign: experts called it out of the ordinary, avant-garde and transgressive. But its detractors demanded legal action against the company for violating moral laws and making a public mockery.
And although they had to pay a fine to the city council and hire personnel to clean up the litter that nobody picked up from the central square, that marketing campaign obtained the expected results: Sunrise Coffee® was saved from bankruptcy and Margaret had to bite her tongue, recognizing her grandmother Bia as a visionary businesswoman capable of doing the impossible to save the family's inheritance.
People who accessed the free coffee coupons, also bought other Sunrise Coffee® products, making the company recover millions in profits. Bia had done it, even if people were now calling them #CoffeeNaked.
