The Talkability process
In the New Scientist, Condomi, HP Sauce, Slendertone, Zoo and Fisher-Price case studies, PR is at the core of what became buzz phenomena. But the ideas weren't just arrived at by accident. A deliberate process had been followed. First, the brief was analysed and the current situation assessed both from the client's own perspective and through market and competitor analysis. Next, opinions were discussed and an informal strategic brief was set. These stages in the process are quite similar to...
The growing benefits of advergames
Advergames offer the opportunity of mining consumer data that is unheard of in traditional media.Advertisers have found that, in return for the value of the game-playing experience, the audience is far more likely to opt-in to sign up for future promotions and products, or share personal information with an advertiser seeking a richer database. Campaigns that integrate advergames will routinely get 50-75 of the participants choosing to opt-in to future messages or promotions. For example,...
How to drive brand advocacy
Because word of mouth advocacy is of critical importance in driving business success, a good case can be made for arguing that everything coming out of a marketing department should be focused on increasing advocacy rates. Whether it's advertising campaigns, promotional offers, PR, or any other marketing initiatives, the overall strategic goal of marketing should be to optimize the likelihood of people recommending your brand to each other. But how do you create campaigns that generate word of...
Case Study 1 1
Client Birds Eye Walls Ice Cream - Magnum Moments bite-sized . Environment The point of sale in major grocery stores. Target consumer Female shoppers of all ages. Brief Birds Eye Walls launched small, bite-sized Magnum Moment ice creams as a new addition to the Magnum range. They came in boxes containing three flavours chocolate, hazelnut and caramel. A unique live point-of-sale campaign was required, designed to create awareness of the range via product sampling, to drive sales based on a...
Justin Kirby
Managing Director, Digital Media Communications DMC Connected marketing techniques such as word of mouth are firmly back on the marketing agenda. This phenomenon has been formalized during the past decade by specialist books, including Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point,1 Emanuel Rosen's Anatomy of Buzz2 and Seth Godin's Unleashing the Ideavirus3.The hype about word of mouth marketing's potential for achieving viral-like message spread has also been fuelled by well-known success stories, such...
Why viral marketing makes sense
Why are marketers increasingly using viral marketing as part of their overall brand marketing activities It's all about power and money. Packaging, billboards, branded clothes, signage, trademarked sounds, free food samples, the smell of coffee or baking bread,TV ads, interruptive online ads, unsolicited cell phone clips . . . our every sense is assaulted constantly by both overt and covert marketing messages delivered via a growing plethora of media channels. No wonder people have learned to...
Notes and references Gcg
1 Gladwell, M. 2000 The Tipping Point How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Little, Brown and Co. 2 Rosen, Emanuel 2000 The Anatomy of Buzz Creating Word of Mouth Marketing. New York HarperCollins Business. 3 Godin, Seth 2001 Unleashing the Ideavirus. Chicago Dearborn. 4 Reichheld, EE 2003 'The one number you need to grow', Harvard Business Review, 81 Dec. 46-54. 5 Wilson, Dr Ralph E 2000 'The six simple principles of viral market-ing'.Web Marketing Today, Issue 70. 1 February. 6...
Planning a successful viral marketing campaign
Viral marketing, as its name implies, aims to reach the widest possible number of people among which any brand's target market lies . Campaigns kick-start buzz generation and viral spread - then it's up to consumers, who become brand advocates and free media channels as they pass the buzz talk and viral agent on, providing valuable peer-to-peer endorsement. However, the ultimate point of a viral marketing campaign is not only to 'go viral' though this is still important while CPM-type cost per...
Overview of Connected Marketing
In Part One Connected Marketing Practice, Paul Marsden, a market researcher at the London School of Economics, kicks off with a chapter on seed marketing - pre-launch sampling initiatives with opinion leaders, conducted in the name of market research. The chapter explains how to set up and run effective seeding trials, and uses case studies from Procter amp Gamble, Pepsi, 3M, Google and Microsoft to show how seeding trials with opinion leading consumers can boost sales by up to 30 . By...
The opinion leader screener
Opinion leaders are simply those target buyers in your market who are likely to frequently offer or be elicited for category-related advice. The self-designation technique for identifying opinion leaders involves asking existing and potential buyers to fill out a short opinion leadership screening questionnaire How much do you agree or disagree with the following statements 1 Strongly Disagree to 5 Strongly Agree 1. My friends neighbours consider me a good source of advice about category 2. I...
Liam Mulhall
So, how do you get consumers to demand a product that doesn't exist, from a company they've never heard of in the high-volume commodity beverage industry, without spending a dime on traditional marketing and without a production facility, staff, or any money Answer start with a large dash of ignorance, forget industry best practice and do everything 'wrong' This may sound reckless but such an approach has enabled a bootstrapped, start-up beer company called Brewtopia to compete with the largest...
Case Study 4 Ford SportKa
Brand Ford, automotive manufacturer. Campaign Ford SportKa Evil Twin 'Pigeon' 2003 . Description This viral marketing campaign featured a digital video clip by The Viral Factory showing a pigeon being knocked out or possibly killed by the car hood. The campaign raised a large amount of buzz, including many pages of user-driven chat on car forums, complaints from pigeon fanciers and very high-profile spillover into offline media. It peaked on UK TV car show Top Gear, one of the BBC's...
Notes and references 1
1 American Marketing Association definition, archived at http tinyurl.com dcer6. 2 For more on Post-it Notes story see articles archived at http tinyurl.com a8lf and http tinyurl.com av6ts. 3 For a description of the Hawthorne trials see Mayo, E. 1933 The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization. New York Macmillan. For a good online review see http tinyurl.com bz8t6. 4 Gladwell, M. 2000 The Tipping Point How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Boston Little, Brown and Company, p. 259....
The truth about opinion leaders
Simply by finding and reaching those few special people who hold so much social power, we can shape the course of social epidemics . . . Look at the world around you . . . With the slightest push - in the right place - it can be tipped . . . Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point .4 With the possible exception of Tom Peters's Thriving on Chaos,5 The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is perhaps the most influential and widely read book to date on the power of word of mouth. Voted by Forbes as one...
Live peertopeer buzz marketing
This chapter has focused on live performer-to-peer buzz marketing. But a chapter on live buzz marketing which did not feature a live peer-to-peer case study would be incomplete. Live peer-to-peer buzz marketing is an enormously controversial area and has sparked much heated debate.Why It's simply seen by many as being too 'big brother' for their liking, too underground, too insidious -marketers causing their brands and products to seep into every part of our lives, including our personal lives....
What is live buzz marketing
Much like many other approaches to connected marketing, at its most basic level live buzz marketing is simply an attempt to harness, define and formalize what people have done since the beginning of time - talk to one another. Or, perhaps more accurately, it's an attempt to create or manufacture what people have done since the beginning of time. Marketers have now seen and acknowledged the enormous power of word of mouth and have tapped into it, coming up with a host of ways to kick-start it....
Notes and references
1 From Dash, M. 1999 Tulipomania The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused. New York, NY Crown Publishers. See also Mackay, C. 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. London Wordsworth Reference and Tarses, M. 1999 'Tulipmania.com' online article archived at www.sunwayco.com tulipmania.html. 2 From Dye, R. 2000 'The buzz on buzz', Harvard Business Review, 78 6 139-146. 3 Reichheld, F 2003 'The one number you need to grow',...
Conclusion
As the live buzz marketing industry continues to develop, and as brands start to recognize its power and enjoy its effectiveness and immediacy, credibility will only be established through accountability. This must include word of mouth reach numbers, recall rates, propensity to purchase rates and where relevant actual sales data. Regardless of which live buzz marketing technique is used, solid, reliable, fully accountable research and reporting will differentiate the good from the bad, and...
Case Study 2
Client GlaxoSmithKline's Lucozade Energy. Primary target audience 16- to 24-year-old males. Brief Lucozade Energy's proposition of mind and body energy was clearly communicated via an on-pack promotion, which enabled consumers to win the opportunity to learn how to practise a cool skill that required both forms of energy becoming a DJ, rally driver, or film stuntman. The stuntman promotion was communicated in movie houses around Britain and was appropriately tied in to the release of Spiderman...
Creating advocacy with Icecards
Another simple solution to creating brand advocates and amplifying the advocacy of existing advocates is to enable clients, customers, or consumers to order free or low-cost brand merchandise, such as stickers and stationery to share with friends. At Icemedia, this idea has been developed into a turnkey brand advocacy programme that has been adopted by brands such as L'Oreal, O'Neill, adidas, Bacardi and MSN. The idea is simple enable brand adorers and brand advocates to order free sets of...
Conclusion 1
Getting your loyal clients, customers, or consumers to do your marketing for you by transforming them into active and vocal brand advocates is a powerful and cost-effective word of mouth marketing strategy. Brand advocacy programmes can harness the goodwill and energy that already exists in a market, leveraging the sizeable investment that many brands make in getting people to love them. By making brand users feel part of the brand family with personalized brand merchandise such as Icecards to...