Understanding the Buzz About Buzz Marketing - Drawbacks of Buzz Marketing
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There are some drawbacks to buzz marketing too. Ever heard the saying, “A happy customer tells a friend; an unhappy one tells ten”? While I’m not sure that this is a precise fact, there is something to this statement that does ring true because humans as a species tend to remember the negatives far easier than the positives.
Without going too much into the scientific reasoning behind this, I do want to point out why this is. Generally, when you’re happy, you may or not be filled with endorphins. But when you’re angry or upset, the body is flooded with adrenalin, which enables the body to fight. The fight reaction in us is one of the natural instincts we had as prehistoric beasts, and enabled us to survive. While I don’t claim to understand all of the science there, all I know is what I see in myself or others around me.
When I’m angry, for example, it’s harder to go to bed and relax, but it is much easier to take an action against something. When I am happy, I am relaxed, and I can sleep like a cat at noon, and find myself putting off the negative things. Needless to say, angry customers have far more energy to say disrespectful things about your product or service than a happy or satisfied customer has to solicit business for you from their friends. That is, unless, you truly have a product that has saved their life or changed their life so drastically that it produces feelings that far outweigh the energy from angry hormones.
Buzz marketing has been referred to as evangelism. Evangelism, while technically the zealous ability to spread the gospel and convert followers, can still apply to marketing. When a person is so excited about a particular thing, they can’t help but talk about it. This is the idea behind evangelism and buzz marketing alike. You want people to be excited about what you have to offer, and tell their friends about you and your stuff. You literally have people taking the message to the streets and spreading the good news.
Up and coming artists and musicians promote their new CDs with “Street Teams.” It’s these Street Teams who do much of the word of mouth promotions for not just music, but for snack foods, teen magazines, hair care products and anything else you can think of. You know that lady in the supermarket who gave you the little food sample last Saturday? She’s probably not on a Street Team, but you should consider her part of the wave of buzz marketing.
Buzz marketing is also important to propagate branding. Branding anymore seems only to apply to huge names in advertising, like car companies, athletic shoes, or sodas. But this is not necessarily the case. The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a "name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers." Every company strives for branding. Key elements to creating a brand are familiarity, repeat business, and uniqueness. (I’ll talk about creating effective strategies for branding in the next article.)
BusinessWeek Magazine calls this the Summer of Buzz. “This is the new world of buzz marketing, where brand come-ons sometimes are veiled to the point of opacity and where it is the consumers themselves who are lured into doing the heavy lifting of spreading the message. Sure, generating great buzz for their products has been the holy grail in marketing circles since P.T. Barnum learned to work a crowd. But the art of generating word-of-mouth has grown far more sophisticated since the early days of simple publicity stunts. Marketers are learning to turn their brands into carefully guarded secrets that are revealed to a knowing few in each community, who in turn tell a few more, who tell a few more, and so on.”
In the next article, I will focus on specific ways you can promote the buzz over your service, product, or website using the Internet, and how you can implement these things without needing to invest a small fortune in advertising. Because let’s face it; you just don’t have that kind of money, do you? Once you’ve successfully created your brand, then you can afford to spend the big bucks.
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