Tag: Graubünden Tourism

The Village Telephone

The mountain village of Tschlin has the reputation of being the quietest place in Switzerland. In fact, things are so quiet that when the telephone in the village square rings, you can hear it in every corner of the village.

In a clever marketing stunt to drive tourism to the village, Graubünden Tourism along with ad agency Jung von Matt started giving out the village telephone number online. Anyone who called the village number between 10am and 8pm would be greeted by one of the village residents. If the phone call went unanswered the caller would win one of the many prizes (free stay, dinner, t-shirts etc) on offer.

To prove that no one was sitting next to the phone, they setup a live feed of the phone at the campaign microsite www.dorftelefon.ch.

The action started on Monday, 6th June and ended on Saturday, 11 June 2016.

The Great Escape

In 2011, Switzerland’s Graubünden Tourism and agency Jung von Matt created a clever stunt to publicize the remote mountain village of Obermutten on Facebook.

Then in 2015, they decided to target people a little closer to home i.e. the stressed urban commuters in a Zurich train station. This time they used an interactive display featuring a genuine Graubünden mountain man who could see and talk to those who walk past. Passersby who interacted with the mountain man were offered an all expense paid trip to Vrin, a mountain village in the Lumnezia Valley. The only catch being, that they needed to drop everything and jump onto the train leaving from the next platform.

Obermutten. A little village goes global.

Obermutten is a little and lovely mountain village in the Canton of Graubünden, Switzerland. It has a mere seventy eight residents and is known to virtually no one expect to a few hikers passing through now and then.

Now some sixty million people around the world have either read about or heard of Obermutten as ad agency Jung von Matt/Limmat created a very simple Facebook campaign that put this peaceful and small Swiss mountain village on the world map! Media reports about the village have also appeared in over twenty countries. Obermutten has even made it into the main news programme in South Korea.

How? Well it all began with a newly created village Facebook page where the local mayor made a remarkable promise via a video: Just click on “like,” and your profile picture will be posted on the Commune’s official notice board. In no time at all, the board was completely covered with fans. In order to deal with the flood of likes, it was necessary for them to start hanging the profile pictures on barn walls in the village! The community since then has increased to over 14000 fans!