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 What worked ten or fifteen years ago will now be seen by consumers as irrelevant and outdated.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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Copyright 2005, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com.