I’ve been talking and brainstorming about this with friends and colleagues over the past several months and here are my conclusions.
If you market with a cause, a passion, meant for the betterment of society - you’ll massively improve your chances of success. However, when I refer to marketing with a cause, I’m not talking about the traditional “Cause Marketing” . Let me explain.
Figure out what you believe in as a company and ensure that that opinion proliferates through your brand. e.g. If you’re an “off the beaten path” architect looking to provide great value, do so…but do it with a passion for saving the world. Remember, I’m not saying lie! All I’m saying is that figure out what cause you are backing through your product’s and company’s values and market it with a passion.
The key is to romance the ideal that you and your product stand for. Given the current cultural conditioning of consumers, I would say this is the right way to go!
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Community Vehicular Reclamation Project
The ‘remix’ is still around and it propagates itself in various shapes and forms around us. This (see picture) is yet another example of the counter-culture making its way onto the streets – The Community Vehicular Reclamation Project. Who are the people behind these forms of art today? What sort of a subculture do they live and operate in? What makes them unique and gives them an identity in society?
These are just some of the important questions that I am asking as a marketer looking to understand consumer culture.
So, how is knowing about and understanding this subculture useful to the marketing industry?
1. You could take inspiration from such art in designing your own campaigns (there have been many such in the past and have proven to be an effective way to generate buzz, or get arrested…)
2. These artists could be your “influencers” – so understanding their culture would help you better target them.
3. Even if they’re not part of your target market, the issues they take up could have a direct negative impact on the sales of your product/service – especially given the cultural conditioning of people today.
While many such counter-cultures may appear small and disjointed, history has shown us that it only takes a few small but critical events before one such culture attains critical mass. We need to pay attention.
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I blogged on ethics in Buzz Marketing a while back and some recent events on Chris Brogen’s site has prompted me to blog on the subject matter again. Of late, people have been giving Chris Brogen a hard time because he wrote a few blog posts praising some companies simply because he had genuinely had a great experience with them.
I just want to clarify here that whether or not these companies gave Chris something (free product/experience etc) is immaterial. What matters is that he will praise a company / product only if he feels that the experience he has had truly warrants praise. In his recent blog, Chris did a great job of summing this up…
“Giving someone something doesn’t elicit praise. Praise comes from an experience that causes positive emotions, and that’s a tricky thing that matters. It’s hard to do the right things to elicit praise, but then again, that’s the deal.”
…and this is the premise that Buzz Marketing is and must be based on! Creating a truly unique customer experience and exceeding expectations will ultimately prove to be the best way to generate buzz.
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Buzz marketing can be done in 2 basic ways.
The first type involves recruiting volunteers (the so-called ‘influencers’) to act as agents for a product. In this form of buzz marketing an agent acts as an independent entity and has the freedom to express his/her views openly with no obligation to the company. Such techniques not only empower consumers but also ensure that corporations produce products that deliver a truly unique value proposition. Basically, a company has to be extremely confident in its offering to allow its consumers to talk freely about its product, even if it is critical at times.
The second type involves hiring agents (posers) who are paid to enter into public domain and behave or act in the desired way with the intention of grabbing consumers’ attention and creating buzz. For example, in order to promote one of its camera phones, Sony Ericsson hired actors to pose as average Joes walking around the city asking people to take pictures of them – the idea being that when people took the camera to take pictures, they would realise that it was actually a phone as well.
The problem however with the latter technique is that these agents aren’t expressing their opinions but those of the corporation itself. Therefore, since the message being sent is not authentic, it cannot be trusted. At the end of the day, consumers hate being duped and that is exactly what this technique achieves!
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Here’s an excerpt from an interview of Emanuel Rosen, author - The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited: Real-life lessons in Word-of-Mouth Marketing
“Twitter has a couple of advantages at the moment. First, it gives marketers direct access to customers. If someone tweets about Volvo, the car maker can start a dialogue with that person. Access to customers on Facebook is more hierarchical: As a marketer, you can have a dialogue with people who identified themselves as fans of your brand or category. Then, you hope that they will spread the word to their friends. On Twitter, you have access not only to those who are most passionate about your brand, but to anyone who mentions it. This is powerful stuff as long as marketers use it to improve the customer’s experience and not to spam people. As marketers abuse the privilege of direct access, we can expect this advantage to erode.
Things in this space change rather quickly and Facebook has some strengths too, not the least important—a huge audience. If your potential customers are mainly on Facebook, the advantages of Twitter listed above don’t mean much to you, and you should launch on Facebook, which brings me to my last point: Whenever I’m asked an “or” question, I always question the very need to make a choice. Companies can pretty easily try both Twitter and Facebook and see which one works best for them.”
A second advantage derives from the nature of relationships between people on Facebook versus those relationships on Twitter. On Facebook the relationships are two-way. To define them as “strong ties” or “friendships” would be a stretch in many cases, but the links are stronger than on Twitter, where you can pretty much follow anyone and they don’t have to follow you back. This means that Twitter has more weak ties, which is actually a good thing in terms of how fast and wide information spreads.
The interview was conducted by Guy Kawasaki and is published on Guy’s blog - http://blog.guykawasaki.com/
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Oct 09
21
Trying to create buzz? Don't forget lesson 1 – Start with a superior user experience!
Zipcar iPhone app customer reviews
I’ve been wanting to blog on this Zipcar iPhone App debacle, just hadn’t gotten the time this week. Anyhoos, I managed to sneak some time in now, so here goes.
This whole Zipcar incident reminds me of the company Momenta that released its “pen-based” computer back in the day (sometime in 1991 I think). The problem with Zipcar is very similar to that which Momenta experienced – you could have the greatest buzz campaigns, the coolest PR team and the sweetest gigs, but at the end it always boils down to the user experience.
If you look back on the early days of the Palm or even the iPod, you will find that buzz can essentially be described as “the word on the street”. It’s what people will say about your product based on their experience with it!
Yes, I know what you’re thinking…and I agree. A good, well executed PR and marketing campaign helps, but only when accompanied with a quality experience.
Another important lesson here is to not get so carried away with the desire to generate buzz that you end up creating excessively high expectations in the marketplace. Palm’s old philosophy of “under promising and over delivering” could work. I personally am a fan of setting the right expectations and then beating it by just a little.
PS: I had to revisit a cool book called “The Anatomy of Buzz” in order to write this post effectively. Just thought I’d share that with you in case you were interested in reading more about buzz marketing.
Posted in Marketing Commentary by Ujwal Arkalgud. No Comments