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Get the Buzz in Your Marketing
Marketing is anything but a clearly defined science. What worked ten or
fifteen years ago will now be seen by consumers as irrelevant and
outdated. New generations are out there with unprecedented demands and
new channels of communication; to ignore them is to invite marketing
failure.
All any marketer can hope to do is to remain vigilant and keep an eye on
the changing landscape. When a
new form of marketing emerges it’s worth studying and evaluating to
determine its relevance to your own products.
‘Buzz marketing’ is one of these newer forms of marketing. It’s out
there and working right now for many businesses around the world. What
is it and how does it help an organization accomplish its marketing
goals?
Something People Talk About
Buzz marketing is essentially a
form of word-of-mouth. It’s been part of the marketing toolkit
for centuries and is still one of the most powerful avenues of
promotion. When one person tells another about a product or service it
amounts to their giving it a personal recommendation. There’s no worry
about cutting through the advertising clutter on a TV station or in a
magazine; this is face to face communication that gains the full
attention of the audience.
Studies have been conducted that
show word-of-mouth is up to ten times more effective than an advertising
message on television. It’s also believed, remembered better and
costs a lot less. It’s an advertiser’s dream but it isn’t really
advertising.
Buzz marketing uses the same mechanism as word-of-mouth but takes it
well beyond one person just telling another about their experience with
a product. Buzz marketing gives people a reason or even a compulsion to
talk about a product, and it also makes that product worth hearing
about.
A recent global example came from the Superbowl when Janet Jackson’s
breast was briefly exposed on nationwide television. The resulting
controversy stayed alive in the media for months afterwards and most
certainly helped to promote the sales of her new CD ‘Damito Jo’ that was
released the week after the game. (And who hasn’t heard of the term
‘wardrobe malfunction’ by now?)
Was the whole event staged or did it happen by accident? It’s impossible
to say for certain and Jackson’s organization denies any suggestion that
it was deliberate. Nevertheless, it created a ‘buzz’ around the world
and that’s what buzz marketing’s all about.
Make your Theme Memorable
Think about how uninteresting some product categories are. What could be
exciting about a basic commodity like meat? Yet in Australia both pork
and lamb have become the subjects of buzz marketing campaigns and
increased their sales as a result, not because of any changes to the
products but because of a change in the way they were marketed.
It all began with advertising campaigns – created with some desperation
as sales of red meat were rapidly declining at the time as the result of
an increased focus on health issues. Red meat was seen as a source of
fats and cholesterol and consumers were moving rapidly towards chicken
and vegetarian dishes instead.
Pork was advertised with the catchy theme of ‘put some pork on your
fork’, giving rise to numerous puns and suggestive comments at cocktail
parties and other social gatherings. The reach of the advertising was
dramatically increased by the theme’s repetition.
Lamb was advertised using a scenario where a girl gives up an evening
with Tom Cruise to stay home and have a lamb dinner. Nearly ten years
after the campaign ended it’s still actively recalled in conversations
when people say “I’d rather have that than a night with Tom Cruise”.
You Can Also Make Buzz Controversial
Buzz marketing works best when the subject is controversial or
outrageous, or when something’s so funny or unusual people will find
reasons to include it in their conversation. The dinner scene in the
movie ‘When Harry Met Sally’ where Meg Ryan fakes a sexual experience
got everyone talking about that part of the film whether they’d seen it
or not.
Other avenues of buzz marketing have included paying people to approach
total strangers on public transport and talk to them about a product, or
having attractive young models take a newly-released cellular telephone
to a prominent public place and ask others to take their photos with it.
There are very few boundaries that buzz marketing recognizes.
How can you put some ‘buzz’ in
your own marketing? Start by making sure that your product or service is
worth talking about. Nothing could be worse than having the ‘buzz’ be a
negative one.
Get the Buzz
Identify the networks most likely to talk about your products. Are they
young people at dance parties or 50-plus year olds attending retirement
seminars? Work out what there is about your product that could make it
the subject of conversation inside these networks.
The final consideration will be the medium you use. It could be
advertising, it could be people dressed in chicken costumes, or it could
be the name you give to your new product or service. Something has to
start the buzz happening and that requires the creation of awareness.
Is buzz marketing really new? It has elements of so many earlier
marketing techniques that it’s hard to say for sure. What is new is the
way buzz marketing is working today, deliberately used as part of
carefully-planned strategic marketing initiatives to sell anything from
movies to automobiles.
Buzz marketing succeeds because
we are all social animals and like to share our thoughts with others. It
can happen accidentally or deliberately, although it usually manifests
itself as a spontaneous or unscripted event. It works quickly and often
lasts well beyond the currency of the subject itself. Just like
it worked for Nobby’s brand of peanuts when they used the theme ‘nibble
Nobby’s nuts’, it could work for you.
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