Buzz Marketing - Using Buzz To Build Your Brand
In a recent post titled ” Build A Better Brand“, I described a new venture I am developing. This post follows on from that one, but deals with the issue of marketing and establishing your brand; more specifically, it deals with ‘Buzz Marketing’ and its importance in generating rapid growth and recognition.
What Is Buzz Marketing
The terms buzz marketing and viral marketing are often used interchangeably. In reality, the goal of buzz marketing is to make a product or service go viral; the buzz is simply the means for achieving this.
There are various definitions for what buzz marketing is, but essentially it is a marketing technique that attempts to promote a product or service by means of stealth so that the consumer is unaware of the actual marketing. Buzz marketing relied a lot on word-of-mouth campaigns to create the ‘Buzz’. The marketer would pitch some details to a select few people in the target audience, who in turn pass the ‘inside knowledge’ on to their friends. This way, the marketers use word-of-mouth campaigns and the consumers themselves to spread the word. People are inclined to be influenced by their peers.
The Buzz Explosion
While buzz marketing isn’t new, it has undergone an explosion over the last few years. So what has caused this explosion?
- Buzz is cheap
- Buzz bypasses consumer skepticism
- The Internet has proven a boom, with the ability to reach nearly everyone
The Internet has proven to be a buzz marketers dream. It is cheap, the viral potential is huge and the audience can be targeted.
It’s The Conversation
There are a few important elements of a successful buzz marketing campaign.
- Planning
- Know your target group
- Know the influential people within that group
The important element for an effective buzz campaign is development of the conversation. Without this, there is no buzz. The idea is to get people mentioning, talking about and promoting the product/service. To achieve this requires careful planning, knowledge and skill.
It Doesn’t Have To Be Positive
Something to remember is that effective buzz marketing does not have to be positive. Now that statement does not apply for every company or campaign, obviously it would be no good to get a negative response to a new drug from a pharmaceutical company, but ignoring specific instances, if the goal is to generate buzz, then whether the buzz is positive or negative is irrelevant to a large degree.
There is a good example from Abercrombie & Fitch in 2002. The company produced t-shirts with the slogan, “Wong Brothers Laundry Service — Two Wongs Can Make It White” and shows two smiling men with slanted eyes wearing conical hats. For obvious reasons this prompted protests, complaining phone calls and e-mails, resulting in the t-shirt line being withdrawn and the company apologizing profusely for the offense.
Was this accidental, or deliberate?
It was effective.
How Effective Can Buzz Be?
To give a little example of how effective buzz can be, I have recently been applying various buzz strategies to new Websites, each with quite exceptional results. On the same day that one Website went live, I did applied a very simple and effective buzz technique that resulted in the site being listed in the top 60,000 sites on the Web by the next day. If you are unfamiliar with the Internet, a similar site would normally be in the top 3 million, if you were lucky. I achieved this without a full blown or concerted campaign.
This can apply just as well in the offline World. While you can use the Internet as a means for creating buzz for an offline business, similar techniques can be used for offline marketing. This is the stage I am at with the new business. I have already planned the buzz campaigns and have various elements in place and ready to implement.
Follow Up Buzz
One buzz is not enough. While one buzz campaign can be extremely effective, more is better. After running a successful buzz campaign, what should you do. The answer is, build upon it. If all you did was run the one buzz campaign and then sit back, thinking that your marketing is done, you would have wasted a golden opportunity. You need to grasp the moment and maintain the buzz, building upon it to establish your brand.
That is what I will be doing and it is one of the most effective ways of establishing a new brand and gaining the recognition that can often take years to achieve with more traditional marketing techniques.
For my new venture, I will be receiving a prominent editorial in the leading industry magazine, with pictures. I have another publication that will also be publicizing the venture. None of this will cost me anything at all. Other companies are paying costs, simply because they want to associate their companies with the venture. This is not the buzz, but the effects of it from behind the scenes that will work effectively in conjunction, once the buzz explodes.
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