It takes vision to create a campaign. And going the viral way takes more than just vision. It takes heart, mind and soul. No wonder it is a tricky affair and failure is a dark shadow.
“I was recently watching the trailers for the upcoming movie ‘I love you, Beth Cooper’, about a valedictorian who confesses his love for the most popular girl in school during his graduation speech and this inspired me to make a confession of my own. Given that this is the last day of high school and not knowing what can happen, I cannot let this opportunity just pass by. So here it goes…I love you, Jake Minor.”
Kenya Meija was hired by 20th Century Fox, paid $1800, to close her valedictory address at Los Angeles’s Alexander Hamilton High School. Fox hired consultants to videotape her speech, keeping the production values low so as to make it look authentic. The video was then posted on YouTube. Hardly anyone saw the clip, and the same was the movie. It took in just $13.5 million in its first three weeks, which was $6 million less the production cost.
The unabashed show of money, glamor, glitz, and power called the “Indian Premier League” had the entire nation in frenzy, with the recently held player auction. The show was filled with unexpected twists and turns, with many unheralded players hitting the jackpot, and many experienced players being shown the door by franchises. The event attracted the attention of the entire cricketing fraternity across the globe with many foreign stars in the fray for IPL spots and the big bucks that accompany them.
The show was an expression of the growing power of cricket in the global sports arena. Already, the IPL is an event of global popularity, and interest levels are growing exponentially with each passing year. Also, the CL-T20 is also growing as a brand with each passing year. These are great times indeed for the game, and India is leading the way forward in revolutionizing the sport. The leading IPL stars would receive pay equivalent to some of the top stars in the English Premier League. These are interesting times for cricket, and if properly marketed and branded, IPL and
To increase sales, the company needs to satisfy the consumer needs in a superior fashion. These days, companies are trying to sell the experience rather than the product in order to boost the satisfaction. If the consumer purchases a durable product then it takes a long time before he again buys any similar product. By selling the experience along with the product, the companies are making sure that consumer sells this experience to other consumers, hence creating the ripple effect.
The consumers are willing to pay a premium for experience. Consider homemade coffee which hardly costs you Rs. 2, if you buy it from local coffee shop then it will cost you around Rs. 5 which is reasonable still, but if you buy it at Cafe Coffee Day, Barista or Star-bucks it will cost you in excess of Rs. 30. So basically consumer willingly pays 500% more than the local coffee shop, also he takes the experience with him and spreads a word about these places. Similarly, no person goes to Disneyland only for the rides and goodies they provide there, but to have an experience with their closed ones and Disneyland provides them exactly that.
There is a world beyond what we see. Especially, when what we see is controlled by other beings. Development is happening in all the fields known to man. The same is the case with the field of psychology, neurology and, what may seem as a non-related field, marketing. Marketers are increasingly calling psychologists for help. Psychologists are studying the response of human beings to various things, i.e. stimuli, with help of neurologists and neurological equipments. One finding of this effort, which has given marketers one more tool to do their business, is the discovery of mirror neurons and its behavioral implications. A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires up both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons have been directly observed in primates, humans and other species including birds. In humans, brain activity consistent with that of mirror neurons has been found. More recently Christian Keysers and colleagues have shown that, in both humans and monkeys, the mirror system also responds to the sound of actions.
A study involving macaques (year 1992), a type of monkey, had given a hint long ago to scientists that something like mirror neurons exists in humans also. The researchers did some experiments and found out that the monkeys had a tendency to repeat some particular actions being done by the researchers. The following photographs depict such experiments.
Did you notice that when someone talks to you very slowly or whispers something to you, you also lower your voice or start whispering while speaking to that person? Do you have any explanation for why you imitate when someone whispers? Why is it that when a child watches another child having ice cream, he also wants the same kind of ice cream? Did you ever notice that when we go to a place with a certain accent prevalent in language, we tend to use the same accent after some time? It was scientifically found that the culprit for such actions in humans was mirror neurons. Some scientists say that it may be a method of learning employed by the brain while others say this may be a method of connecting to other beings of same or different species. Both the arguments are supported by evidences. It is a method of learning in the sense we learn by observing and trying to do the same thing. Also, it may be one of the methods employed by the brain to make it more acceptable in a group. These findings are being effectively used by marketers.
To take this finding further, it was found that when we see something happening to somebody, our neurons which would fire up when we would do that thing ourselves, fire up. That is, just by listening to someone’s experience or by seeing someone do something, our brain tends to experience it virtually. This fact is being used by marketers unknowingly from a very long period. The simplest example would be of the mannequins which are at an apparel store. When a woman sees a mannequin with a set of clothing looking so beautiful and attractive, the woman’s brain tells her that she would look the same if she wears those cloths. Her brain loses the rational thinking about her own body structure. It is overridden by the emotions caused by the mirror neurons. Thus, when she buys that same pair of clothing she is not only buying the cloths but also she is buying that image. That is the reason marketers always want to associate their brand with some relevant attractive image.
The concept is being consciously used in the industry now-a-days. Observe the following videos:
They are iPod advertisements. The peculiar feature of these advertisements is the thing which is highlighted in it. The colour of the headphones: White. Before this, all the headphones were in dark colours. This is one of the ads which tried to use the mirror neurons concept in its marketing. The moment we see the white, posh “things” falling down from the ears of people, going into their pockets, our mirror neurons light up and we experience what we think, they must be experiencing: in this advertisement they are having enjoying the music in such a fashion that they are not concerned about anything else. The result: astounding sales of iPods.
The advertisements where “envy” is used to create a sense of achievement in potential customers is one example of mirror neurons concept being used in marketing. It is very effective as a marketing tool if we assume that people do same things to connect to other people as humans are social beings.
There are numerous examples of application of this concept in marketing and that too which are successful. From the above examples, we see that marketing is no longer a trial and error phenomenon now. It is as scientific and with explanations as any hardcore science e.g. physics. With such interdisciplinary applications of concepts and findings, we are definitely looking towards more sophisticated efforts for making us buy. So, next time you want to have something which your friend or colleague or neighbor just bought, or you just happen to repeat a dance step being done by one of your friends, you can blame it on the mirror neurons.
For a layman, marketing has been perennially defined as the function of business to sell a product to a consumer. As businesses grew, it was realised by the new age thinkers that the definition and function of marketing goes way beyond this bounded thought which only cared for a customer as a resource to generate revenue and the business as a mechanism to create product. The new wave of marketers thought of marketing as being focussed on value creation and its delivery to the end consumer. A major focus was on improving customer relationship. The growing importance of retaining customers rather than procuring new ones reiterated the crucial concept of Customer Relationship Management which led to the establishment of Customer Lifetime Value as a criterion to check the profitability of business.
With the advent of pro-consumer thinking rather than pro-sales line of thought, the methods of value delivery have seen certain fundamental changes. Earlier, price was assumed to be the sole criterion for demand of a product, but now minute segmentation of consumers based on different values delivered to different groups of customers by the same product indicate the pockets of demand irrespective of the prices. Add on services have assumed paramount importance. The consumer today is well educated and can be highly demanding and the companies have to deliver on their promise.
The IT age has empowered the consumer enormously. The customer is well informed due to “connectivity” with the world, has the option of getting advised from users of different products through internet or television or other media. He or she also has the choice to lambast a product or a company for not giving the desired results. The power to voice an opinion publicly has put an impetus on the companies to perform in every fashion and has forced the transformation of laid back tortoises into agile hares. The marketing plans of firms have moved from tele-advertising and print media to digital age and e-marketing. Telephones and internet are the new points of contact.
These means of communication offer new opportunities for customer relationship management. Companies have the ability to get in touch with on-the-move consumers. Also, since internet and mobile have become a way of life for today’s consumer, 24 hour contact is possible. Intelligent usage of digital media will mark the success of new businesses. The attempt is also to make it easy for the customer to get in touch with the company whenever and wherever he or she requires. The rationale, thus, is to provide customer satisfaction through better and faster access which in turn leads to better and faster service. The seller’s concept of marketing, hence, is out of the window.
All the exercise today is based on the realization that retaining a customer is more sensible based on the lifetime value a long term customer provides and, thus, impacts the overall profitability of the business. Relationship marketing is the buzzword today. Companies are lining up at the doors of consumers to provide better products and value added service. The choice set for a consumer has exploded. Additional services are used to charm the customer and the customer can always negotiate for even more!
Some companies have hence moved on, to creating new ways of communicating the value to the consumer. One of the fastest growing channels is Experiential Marketing. The idea behind experiential marketing is to make the customer feel connected with the product. The connection has to be emotional as well as rational. If the consumer is able to relate to the product, a sale will occur. This form of marketing appeals to the senses of the consumer.
Instead of just focussing on informing the consumer about the product, experiential marketing campaigns allow an interaction between the product and the consumer. The consumer experiences the product and its benefits. This ability to experience and then buying gives confidence to the consumer and makes him/her understand and judge the product or service better.
Mass media has certain limitations, especially in personalizing a product’s benefit knowledge as per the requirement of individuals. Experiencing the product/service, thus, opens new avenues for marketing managers. So, Absolut Vodka gave away sample bottles of their new product in clubs in Australia to spread the word and more importantly, the taste. Hershey on the other hand had Hershey’s Kisses candy mobile marketing campaign’s 25 foot vehicle running through 75 cities a year to promote its candy. Nike gives you a choice to “design your own shoes”.
Such campaigns have suddenly given the market a life of its own. Absorbing the customer in an experience and establishing a positive association are now become paramount to a successful sale. Consumer has a real-time touch with the product, so the touch points become important. If the company messes up in creating a worthwhile experience, the consumer and the sale will vanish in thin air.
The path to tread for companies is challenging but highly lucrative. The evolution is on and will become more and more innovative with the passage of time. And as the consumer gains more bargaining power and becomes more demanding, he would be the real winner.
Internet is one place where the small players can compete effectively with the big fish. Unlike television or print advertising, a huge budget isn’t necessary to make an impression and attract traffic. Guerrillas know that the Internet is the one place where even small businesses can have a large presence. The key thing on the web is to ensure that people visit your website and stay there long enough to do business. To achieve this objective, one needs to be innovative and regularly churn out new ideas.
Large companies possess certain advantages .Chiefly, they have the financial muscle to subsidize banner advertising on high traffic sites, and they can afford to refresh their content often. This enables them to draw new visitors and convert them into devotees. The small companies can level the playing field somewhat by contacting other small- and medium-sized related sites and arranging to trade Web links.
In this video Big-Commerce co-founder Mitchell Harper shares an extremely effective Twitter guerrilla marketing tactic that can be used for attracting hordes of followers and customers to ones online store. Twitter has over 100 million users now and many are searching for the products companies sell online, and this video tells how small companies can increase their sales for virtually nothing.
The big companies have some major disadvantages also. They have more levels of management that have to approve every new marketing decision. They often react late to changes happening in the field due to official procedures involved. It often happens that people at the top are out of touch with the technology and advances of the Web and they may put up resistance to newer and untried ideas and technology. The smaller companies can take advantage of this to stay ahead in this race for continuous innovation.
The adjacent picture lucidly brings out ways in which small companies can get public attention and notice by displaying their objectives and special characteristics on the web and by also pointing out their unique selling points.
In this video, we see a web-design and internet marketing consultancy owner sharing his views on smart marketing ideas and guerrilla marketing. He is basically proposing that their is a need for a more thorough and comprehensive study of guerrilla marketing on the Internet, as per views of many Internet marketers and analysts who suggest that innovative marketing techniques will shape the Internet of tomorrow.
There are many other advantages to being a guerrilla marketer on the web. The smaller companies can have the same level of exposure as bigger ones, and that too at a moderate cost. Also, the small companies don't have the tremendous overhead that their bigger competitors have. As a result their profits don't have to be as high to succeed. They may be able to get up and running on the Web before many of their larger competitors. The entry cost won’t prevent them from experimenting and learning as they move ahead.
To summarize, it would be fair to say that the web cannot reduce the margin between the financial power of corporations and small businesses. However, it does provide an excellent opportunity for the bold and enterprising entrepreneur to expand a business successfully. Hence guerrilla marketing on the web can be effective for small companies in fighting against the bigger players, and staying competitive and alive.
The Blair Witch Project was made for $50,000 by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez with the hope that the movie would make it on to cable television. On January 24 it was screened to an enthusiastic response at the Egyptian Theatre in Park City, Utah at the Sundance Film Festival. After an all night bargaining session, Artisan Entertainment bought the movie for about $1.1 million. And thus, it began.
Artisan spent about $1.5 million on Web promotion, which involved creation of the official website. The Website had the mythology of the Blair Witch with dates and the events and also the legacy of the Blair Witch. The Website grew to include documents and video clips, all of which maintained the film’s poker faced illusion. Numerous unofficial Websites and fan sites sprung up, and chat sites started picking up rumors of the three college kids who were lost in the woods. The hoax took a life of its own and by the time anyone even heard that the film was about to hit the theatres, a fever level anticipation had been built up.
Rather than buying costly network ad time, the company screened the movie on college campuses and co-produced a special on the Blair Witch with the Sci-Fi channel. This made the audience believe that they had discovered the film for themselves, a belief that fed to the traffic. Just before the release of the movie, Artisan spent $20 million on promotion.
On the weekend of the movie’s release, in January, Artisan took out a full page advertisement in Variety, which read, “blairwitch.com: 21,222,589 hits to date.” The movie was opened in so few screens that shows were selling out days in advance. A lot of demand was created for when the movie was to hit more screens later in August.
The Blair Witch Project grossed $1.5 million in its opening weekend playing only on 27 screens. The film grossed a total of $248,639,099, a phenomenal success. Viral marketing, everybody called it and they all wondered, can it be duplicated?
Ten years later, history was recreated. Only, this time it was the next level.
Oren Peli had been afraid of ghosts all his life. He redecorated his house to the extent of repainting the walls and building a stairwell and all the while studying and doing extensive research into paranormal phenomena and demonology. He prepared no script for the actors, only telling them the story and asking them to improvise, a technique known as “Retroscripting”. After an intense week of shooting, the movie was complete with a total expense of $15,000.
The film was screened at the 2007 Screamfest Horror Film Festival where it impressed a lot of people. For an year, it was screened at numerous film festivals. By the screening at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, the film had gained a cult following and caught the attention of Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks, who wanted to remake the movie with a bigger budget. The film was screened as a test to theatrical audience, who started walking out of the theatre while the movie was running, in fear. In 2009, Paramount Pictures released the picture.
Paramount Pictures executive, Amy Powell, gave the movie to fan sites and Web Masters of eight key markets for midnight screenings, even posting their logos on the movie Website. Audience lined up outside the theatres, hours before the show and Paramount had to book more screens for the movie.
Computers in the theater lobbies encouraged the fans to “tweet your scream” and join the Facebook page. On the Website, users were invited to “demand” the movie to be released in their hometowns.
The movie started popping in colleges and cities for select midnight shows. The positive buzz went viral via Twitter and Facebook. The movie was sold as an experience by Paramount and the strategy paid off wonders. The path paved by Blair Witch ten years ago was once again treaded masterfully, but this time there was one additional feature: credibility. Paramount at no time claimed the movie to be anything but fiction.
The movie was a phenomena world over and grossed $193,355,800. And there are many people, across the globe, who still believe the movie to be true. Need more be said to even guess the movie name.
It doesn’t always take big to create big, sometimes small grows much bigger. And viral marketing gave birth to two phenomena, that redefined movie industry dynamics and the way the world saw things. That and some really smart thinking.
From a management point of view, what strikes one first, when one hears about eye-catchy, attention grabbing , effective marketing campaigns? It is generally huge investment, isn’t it? So does it mean that the small and medium businesses do not stand a chance in front of big MNC’s? The solution to budget problems for marketing may have come to an end. But it requires something else in abundance: original thinking or innovation. The secret of successful marketing is sensory stimulus. Marketers want that people should get as involved in a product as possible through their senses like smell, touch, sight etc. Guerrilla marketing is a term coined on such engaging and economical attempts.
Guerrilla marketing may be termed as unconventional system of promotions and advertising and marketing attempts that rely on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketingbudget.
Guerrilla marketing refers to such marketing campaigns which are totally offbeat or so called HAT KE! The term Guerrilla Marketing was coinedby JAY CONRAD LEVINSON in his book on the same subject. This term has successfully found its place in the toolbox of today’s marketer. The concept is best understood through examples.
Take a look at the adjacent photograph. “Well”, you will say, “that doesn’t require a huge investment.” And it is effective also. All that the marketer needs is to get people’s attention so that the brand gets registered in their minds. Who wouldn’t see such a thing while walking down the street? Innovative and effective, isn’t it?
In guerrilla marketing, the marketers try to get as near to people as possible so that their products get noticed. Guerrilla marketing campaigns are always unexpected and unconventional, potentially interactive and consumers are targeted in unexpected places. The objective of guerrilla marketing is to create a unique, engaging and thought-provoking concept to generate a buzz, and consequently turn viral. The most important factor of such attempts is the negligible cost associated with them.
The dog toy shown in the adjacent figure was kept in lots of parks and public places by Meister Camera to communicate the image clarity their camera provides. It was a very successful campaign.
Guerrilla marketing tactics are also being used by government agencies to send a stronger message to people.
Take a look at the video.
In this attempt, the authorities took a photograph of a child and printed real life posters of the girl and placed them all over the city. There was no message on any of the posters. People would notice that little girl everywhere they go. After a few weeks, the authorities put a message on the poster: “The kids you kill never leave you. Slow down near schools”. This had a very deep impact on people of that city and the average speed of vehicles around the school premises was found to be drastically reduced.
While you are traveling for work or for any reason in a metro and you have to hold on to something as shown in the adjacent figure, it would definitely catch your attention. It is very important to recognize what the marketers of the product are trying to do in such add campaigns. If you stress your grey cells a little bit you would get the point that is being made here.
Marketers are trying to create an actual experience for you with the product! The wrist watch advertisement actually puts the watch on your wrist without any resistance from your side. You may turn your attention again to the camera advertisement. It doesn’t say anywhere that their camera provides a superior quality of photographs. The process that starts in one’s mind is important here. The dog is not clearly visible and it is written “See it in more detail”. The moment one sees such a thing, what happens in her mind? The person’s conscious mind works a little bit and tries to figure out what it means and there you have it, people doing, what the marketers actually wanted them to do. They are THINKING. By thinking on such a thing, we unknowingly get involved in the product and the next time we go to buy a camera, Meister would be the first thing that would come to our mind just because we had a personal experience with the brand and that too, we ended up admiring the great minds behind that advertisement. So, there you have it, a great experience with the product or the brand. Didn’t cost much, right?
Nike and many other sports accessory companies have made marketing attempts similar to one shown in the adjacent figure. A bit of psychology is also used here. The crashed car sets our mood in slight fear, a state identical with excitement. The reason sports companies wanted to associate themselves with such an emotion is obvious. Ultimately, they got the publicity they wanted.
One crucial point to be noted here is that as this channel of advertisement becomes more and more effective and the word spreads, it would start flooding, as happened with TV and other media. When a channel gets flooded it obviously loses its effectiveness. So, there is a need for constant innovation by the marketers. Guerrilla marketing seems to be very effective as the companies try to create a personal experience for potential customers. The question here that comes to mind is what next? How personal can companies get to push their sales? The answer to the question lies not far away but in the near future.
