How to Create Profits Using Viral Marketing Techniques by Jerry
Bader
The Difference Among Viral, Buzz, and Word-of-Mouth
There are certain words, jargon that stands in for theory, that starts with
marketing industry insiders and before you know it becomes the 'in' subject of
books, blogs, articles, and MBA dissertations. But as jargon filters down to
the less sophisticated, the meaning and ideas behind these words becomes lost.
Such is the case with the current state of thinking on Buzz, Viral, and
Word-of-Mouth marketing.
These terms are often used interchangeably but are they the same thing? Dave
Balter and John Butman in their book, "Grapevine,' describe Buzz as a marketing
tactic aimed at generating publicity or awareness often without regard to any
specific message, while Viral marketing is a means of spreading a marketing
message through the use of contagious creative most often Web-video and
Word-of-Mouth is the process of product story-telling. Balter's marketing
agency concentrates on creating word-of-mouth campaigns for his clients but the
name of his company is BzzAgent - no wonder the confusion.
Mark Huges, author of the book 'Buzz Marketing- Get People to Talk About Your
Stuff' points out that in order to create buzz about your company or product
you must develop a marketing campaign that incorporates at least one, and
preferable more, of his Six Elements of Buzz: 1. Taboo, 2. Unusual, 3.
Outrageous, 4. Hilarious, 5. Remarkable, and 6. Secret.
It would seem that these six elements are the same elements that generate the
contagious spread of information - Viral marketing. In order for something to
become viral, people must talk about it, ergo word-of-mouth. But people can
talk and spread the word of a video or stunt without ever generating much talk
about the product. The famous, or infamous, Oprah Winfrey-General Motors
audience car give-away stunt is a prime example of generating talk about a
stunt without generating much talk about the product. If as Balter suggest,
word-of-mouth is 'product story-telling,' then there is definitely a difference
between Buzz and Word-of-Mouth.
So if Buzz is the tactic for drawing attention to your company; and Viral is
the method of spreading the message; and Word-of-Mouth is the result; we then
have a clear distinction between the three marketing terms.
The question is how can we construct a Web-based marketing campaign that uses
the Buzz tactic, Viral method, and Word-of-Mouth message to produce the
ultimate marketing objective: more sales and profits; and are Huges' Six
Elements of Buzz the only media attributes that deliver a marketing stir?
Solve The Marketing Mystery: Discover Means + Motive + Opportunity
We've all watched enough 'Law and Orders' on television to know that solving a
mystery requires learning the means, motive and opportunity of the puzzle. For
today's marketers these elements are clear.
Motive: to attract attention, breed interest, stimulate desire, and generate
action that ultimately produces increased sales and profits.
Means: the advent of relatively low cost desktop digital video tools and the
creation of a new class of professional multimedia Web-video producers brings
affordable multimedia creative to businesses that in the past could not afford
professional video content.
Opportunity: the penetration of high-speed Internet connections plus the Web's
ability to delivery multimedia audio and video combined with the introduction
of Web-video search databases by dominant Internet players like Google and
YouTube create the necessary opportunity.
Why Web-Video Solves the Buzz-Viral-Word-of-Mouth Mystery
1. The 5 Strategic Goals of Marketing 2. The Anthropomorphization of Brands 3.
Maslow's Extended Hierarchy of Needs 4. The 5 Elements of Communication
The 5 Strategic Goals of Marketing
Increased sales and profits is every company's prime motive, however, in order
to achieve those goals, certain intermediate objectives must be met, especially
as it concerns the Web that by its nature is a sterile, remote environment.
Marketing campaigns should be constructed to provide the appropriate audiences
with five essential elements: a. Awareness b. Emotional Utility c. Functional
Utility d. Process Facility e. Confidence
Target audiences must be made aware of the company's existence and must be made
to comprehend its relevance to their needs; and market audiences must be
provided with a platform to participate or get involved with the company.
A successful marketing campaign must tap into an audience's need for emotional
utility, a quality created in the audience's collective consciousness from
brand personality resulting from corporate behavior and audience experience.
The campaign must also be able to speak to the functional utility of the
company's products or services. Hard information and easily understood
instructions must be made available so that customers are actually able to
generate the promised benefits of the product or service.
The campaign must facilitate the process of moving potential customers easily
and conveniently from awareness, to utility, to incentive, to sale. The process
must be transparent and mechanisms must be put in place to accommodate
customers when things go wrong.
The campaign must also create confidence in the organization's ability to
deliver the promised benefits both emotional and functional.
The Anthropomorphization of Brands
More marketers are beginning to appreciate the effect of brand personality on
their relationships with customers and prospects. It is apparent that markets
have a clear idea as to a brand's personality, whether a company pays attention
to it or not. And just as significantly, it is clear that companies can't just
change their television commercials or advertising agency to overcome an
unwanted or undesirable personality.
Brand personality is a function of audience experience: everything from the way
you respond to telephone inquiries, to users ability to comprehend packaging
instructions, to your website and email inquiry response times. No amount of
smiling friendly faces in advertisements will make up for the irritation of a
multiple-transfer-disconnect when trying to resolve a problem over the
telephone.
Companies are ultimately separate entities whose personalities are composed of
a collective consumer consciousness created through experience, interpreted
from a very human perspective. It is human nature to anthropomorphize non-human
entities in order to better deal with them. Batra, Lehman & Singh point out
in their 1993 paper that there are five significant human personality traits.
The Big Five Human Personality Traits: 1. Extroversion/Introversion, 2.
Agreeableness, 3. Consciousness, 4. Emotional Stability, and 5. Culture.
Jennifer Aaker in her 'Journal of Marketing Research' article, Dimensions of
brand personality, relates the Big Five Human Personality Traits to the Big
Five Brand Personality Traits.
Big Five Brand Personality Traits: 1. Sincerity, 2. Excitement, 3. Competence,
4. Sophistication, 5. Ruggedness.
When companies build a website or implement any marketing initiative there are
consequences in the market collective; managing those consequences is critical
to not just developing a brand personality but managing and fostering it to
meet your ultimate marketing motive; generating more sales and profits.
Maslow's Extended Hierarchy of Needs as it relates to Marketing
Abraham Maslow, who was the chairman of the psychology department at Brandeis
University in the early 1950's, developed a theory for the hierarchy of human
needs. Before his death in 1970 he revised his theory by extending the
hierarchy to include higher value components.
The bottom of the pyramid starts with our physiological needs: the need to
maintain physical well-being and self-preservation; as you move up the pyramid
the needs become more socio-cultural: the need to be accepted in society; while
at the top of the list the needs become more abstract and intellectual as they
relate to self-identity and the need to communicate that identity to others.
Maslow's Extended Hierarchy of Needs
1. Physiological Needs Water, food, sleep, warmth, health, exercise, sex.
2. Safety & Security Needs Physical safety, economic security, comfort,
peace, freedom from threats.
3. Social Needs Peer acceptance, group membership, love, and association with
successful groups.
4. Self-esteem Needs Association with importance projects, recognition of
strength, intelligence, prestige and status.
5. Self-actualization Needs Need to take on challenging projects, opportunities
for innovation and creativity, learning at a high level.
6. Cognitive Needs Need to acquire knowledge and to understand that knowledge.
7. Aesthetic Needs Need for beauty balance, structure.
As marketers, Maslow provides us with a blueprint for developing a brand
personality that can effectively deliver a compelling, comprehensible,
effective marketing message. Decide which of Maslow's needs your company
satisfies and then construct a marketing plan that delivers both the
personality and message that speaks to those needs.
We are lucky to live in the age of the Internet, for even the smallest of
companies has the opportunity to communicate its brand personality and
marketing message using the most effective communication environment ever
invented, The Web.
The 5 Elements of Communication
To effectively take advantage of the Web's ability to communicate, you must
understand the five elements of communication: 1. The Environment: the Web is a
sterile environment that needs to be humanized in order to effectively deliver
your brand personality and marketing message.
2. The Message: the Web is an information-infotainment environment where
compelling, informative, memorable content is paramount.
3. The Messenger: the Web is a one-to-one communication system compared to
traditional broadcast and print communication that is a one-to-many system.
4. The Audience: the Web is a place where visitors choose to visit you, do not
short change them with second-rate information, poorly delivered in
unimaginative, ascetically challenged presentations.
5. The Process: the Web's multimedia audio and video capabilities combined with
the penetration of high-speed access makes for the perfect system to deliver
brand personality and needs related marketing messages that humanize your
website, speak directly to your audience on a one-to-one basis, and inform,
enlighten and entertain your audience in a compelling, memorable manner.
Conclusion
There has always been an ongoing business battle between those responsible for
technology services and those responsible for marketing services. The Internet
may be a great technological achievement, and it no doubt can be used to
provide extremely useful technological solutions, but at its core and from its
earliest pre-Web days, it was always a way to connect and communicate
information and ideas, and isn't that the essence of marketing?
The need for businesses to create awareness (Buzz), to spread that awareness
throughout the marketplace (Viral), and to involve an audience in the spread of
needs fulfillment (Word-of-Mouth) is achieved by taking advantage of the Web's
multimedia communication capabilities. In short, the Web is a communication
tool that can be used by marketers to speak with a human voice and human face
directly to your attentive publics on a personal, human, one-to-one basis in
order to achieve the prime business motive: more sales and profits.
About the Author
Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a Thornhill, Ontario based website
design firm that specializes in delivering their North American clients'
marketing messages using the latest audio, video, and interactive Flash
presentation techniques to create compelling, informative and memorable
Web-experiences that enhance brand personality and increase sales and profits.
Visit http://www.mrpwebmedia.com,
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