Viral Marketing
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...
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...
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...
Highprofile viral buzz and word of mouth marketing campaigns
Hotmail (1996) The campaign that put viral marketing on the map and that helped Hotmail become the leading personal web-based email service provider. Deceptively simple, the campaign involved turning users of the service into brand advocates, by appending all outgoing emails with a small 'P.S.' message as if it was from the sender 'Get your free email at Hotmail'. By therefore turning Hotmail users into a promotional sales force, the email service recruited 12 million subscribers in 18 months...
Branded promotional games
This is where a game is actually created by the brand itself to support and promote the brand - it's sometimes referred to as advertainment. Often the brand or product will form an integral part of the gameplay. This doesn't have to be the case, but the brand will always be a central element of the game rather than riding on its back. The aim is for the game to be so compelling that it gets passed around the Internet or on mobile phones as the buzz increases and its popularity is communicated...
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',...
Case Study 2 Condomi Size Him Up
Background Condomi is a German company which, from 2002 to 2003, was trying to get established in the UK. It was way behind market leaders Durex and number two brand Mates, and didn't have the marketing bucks of Trojan, which was also trying to grab a slice of the market at the time. Prior to the start of the PR campaign, a third of condoms were bought by women, a fact that gave the PR company a directional steer. Campaign The campaign revolved around 'size', and central to it was an online...
A brief history of viral marketing
Before we launch into the hows and whys of viral marketing practice, it's worth putting viral marketing into context by briefly considering its history. The earliest known use of the term 'viral marketing' is in a 1989 PC User magazine article6 about the adoption of Macintosh SEs versus Compaqs At Ernst & Whinney, when Macgregor initially put Macintosh SEs up against a set of Compaqs, the staff almost unanimously voted with their feet as long waiting lists developed for use of the...