Marketing Blogs
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by Mary Hendersonon Apr 20 |
Marketers who don't understand online distribution can give up on viral success
Marketingmag.com.au welcomes Mary Henderson the CEO of GeekIT Group. Before founding GeekIT, Mary worked in senior business development, marketing and sales roles at companies including Tech Pacific and Belkin. You can follow her on Twitter here. Mary will be blogging fortnightly.
I have a bit of a problem with the term 'viral' to describe a piece of marketing communication passed from peer to peer.
It suggests that the goal of the campaign is simply the means of distribution in and of itself. I prefer to think of the piece of communication as the 'virus'.
I can't comprehend what the viral campaign means if we haven’t established how we're going to touch the consumer first.
And the reality is that you can't, or won’t, go viral until you have a virus that's worth catching.
A good understanding of online distribution channels is essential if you want your communication (or virus) to go viral.
Marketers are in completely the wrong headspace when they think that a brand can start a virus. From an online standpoint, a virus can't be created by a brand first. It can if it's supported by massive mainstream advertising campaign, but that's not really happening in this environment of drastically slashed marketing budgets.
The virus is created by the consumer after they've been able to learn from the product or service or idea, share it with their friends and create dialogue among their friends and family. And there are certain processes that one needs to go through and establish before a virus can take place.
We look at it from a reverse value chain perspective, in that customer comes first and then we take them to product. So, the question is:
“How are we going to get the customer to have an interest in the product, the service, or the idea?”
Apple is the great example of how to a brand can harness consumer-to-consumer communication for the health of the brand. Apple has done it brilliantly offline and online – as have other software and hardware vendors.
They understand their customer, and they go to their customer without waiting for their customer to come to them, and I really think that’s the key to the brand’s viral success.
Software and hardware vendors are great at this sort of communication because they have defined their distribution models and they inherently understand the way people communicate in an online environment.
Where marketers are getting lost is that they're expecting old media consumption habits from new media like social networking sites. People don’t sit back and wait to be entertained by Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter. They make it happen themselves.
And of course, the internet gives consumers an entirely different interaction with a brand. They may not be your customer right now, but could be in 12 month's time when they've had a look at what you offer and have decided your brand is for them, so you can’t target them in the same way you do with a mainstream campaign.
It's a complex proposition to understand the way all the online distribution channels for a virus work, but that’s just what you have to do if you want to have any hope of creating a successful virus.
Next time, I’ll look at these online distribution channels in more detail.
I have to comment that I am a little over the 'Apple has done this and that' references in every marketing blog and forum I have read in the last 6 months. They are a great brand and marketing outfit, but the reality is Apple produced a product that was initially pretty average (the initial iPod was (BAD WORD FILTERED)e and had very very negative user feedback), but they persisted with the technology and eventually broke through with an awesome gadget. Apple supported this with some very cool marketing and this was the cornerstone of their turnaround. The rest is history. Consumers are fickle and perception is King, and even though the initial product was dodgy, we kept buying.
Keep sharing such important posts.