Buzz Marketing as a Powerful Marketing Tool - Essay Example

Buzz Marketing 2009 Outline Executive summary Introduction: buzz marketing as a powerful marketing tool Buzz marketing as an alternative to advertising Advantages and disadvantages of buzz marketing How should buzz marketing be used so that to be effective? Buzz marketing online The risks of buzz marketing Conclusion Executive summary In the paper we will dwell upon the way buzz marketing may be used for brand building and promoting and address the following issues: What is buzz marketing? What are its advantages and disadvantages, threats and opportunities? Buzz marketing online and new tools of buzz marketing: forums, live journals, online communities, social networks (facebook, twitter) etc. What are the conditions of making buzz marketing effective? Introduction: buzz marketing as a powerful marketing tool Buzz marketing is a very important promotion tool, and its effectiveness still grows with the development of the Internet and e-commerce. Business started using these tools after having recognized that when it comes to promoting themselves, creativity is more valuable than the money: “Business managers and marketers with great skills can achieve explosive growth…if they demand creativity, encourage creativity, and do so with no holds barred. If you allow yourself, you will find explosive growth by shifting from the traditional model to a buzz marketing model. Yes, it will seem unfamiliar. Yes, you will be criticized. And yes, it will work”. (Hughes 2005, Chapter 2) Using word of mouth for promoting goods and services is an old tool, yet traditional marketing has only started using it since the audience became sceptical towards “traditional” advertising. As Knermouch and Green (2001, np) have it: “…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. Rather than blitzing the airways with 30-second TV commercials for its new Focus subcompact, Ford Motor Co. recruited just a handful of trendsetters in a few markets and gave them each a Focus to drive for six months. Their duties? Simply to be seen with the car and to hand out Focus-themed trinkets to anyone who expressed interest in it”. Buzz marketing as an alternative to advertising Traditional advertising has ceased to be a reliable source of information for many people, and therefore the good old world of mouth is becoming one of the most powerful tools for the modern marketing specialists for building and promoting brands. People tend to believe the recommendations of their close ones- their relatives and friends- when choosing a product, and therefore the word of mouth is an important marketing tool. On the other hand, word of mouth is the communication that is quite difficult to manage. It is only possible for the company to influence the launch of informational campaign and supplying additional information using the channels that are accessible by the target audience. It is next to impossible to forecast how people will interpret and change this information. (Hughes 2005) However, this instability and even certain risks connected with the use of buzz marketing is not preventing the companies from using it. Advantages and disadvantages of buzz marketing The advantages of buzz marketing are as follows: The information is spreading all by itself, and the expenses are minimal; The participants of the informational exchange trust each other much more than they trust advertising and commercials, therefore the effect is much bigger. The disadvantages of buzz marketing: It is nearly impossible to control the process of spreading of information; It is hard to guess which of the pieces of information will spread by themselves, and which will die almost immediately after it had been launched. How should buzz marketing be used so that to be effective? The initial information should have a potential – i.e. be able to self-reproduce; The information should be spiced up by some facts that make it interesting enough to remember and tell it other people; Because the choice of the initial information to be spread is an important and not an easy step, it should be paid considerable attention: the target audience, source of this information and its content should be meticulously thought of; Buzz marketing should be used as one of the complex of tools of traditional marketing and PR, and cannot be the only tool that the company or the brand is using; For creating a piece of information that will be effective in buzz marketing, it is crucial to write it in a simple and understandable for the target audience language; Target audience is important for buzz marketing because it is necessary to determine who are the people that will spread the information among the others; it is vital to remember that you won’t be able to control the rumours once they start spreading – so you have to make sure they will do more good than harm. However, it is possible and even advisable to add some more information now and then because the people tend to choose the product or build their opinion about the company basing on the number of factors, and buzz marketing is only one of them. (Hughes 2005) Buzz marketing online In Internet marketing there lately appeared a new trend connected with buzz marketing. Whereas before, the focus of e-marketing was upon the search engine optimisation, nowadays it has shifted to social media marketing (i.e. marketing in social networks and promoting in other online communities). Social network is a community of the Internet-users, each of them having a contact list where he can send some kind of information that he considers interesting and funny. It seems to be an ideal medium for buzz marketing. However, it should be noted that using this tool for building and promoting brands, goods and services is not an easy task because it requires to create the right message that the users will be sending and forwarding to each other with pleasure. The information that will work for social networks should be funny and interesting, and should not contain too much commercial information – since the real reason for its spreading among the Internet users should be hidden thoroughly. The most important thing here is a creative original idea. The risks of buzz marketing We have already mentioned that buzz marketing has its advantages and disadvantages – among its disadvantages is the fact that because the source of information about the product or the brand is unofficial, this information is subconsciously perceived by some people as “rumours” and something non-credible. One of the risks of buzz marketing is that even though initially, only credible and verified information about the company and the product is used, afterwards this information might turn into negative rumours with no grounds at all. Taking into account the peculiarities of the people’s mind that tends to react, above all, to the negative facts than to the positive, this poses a significant threat to the company’s image. Conclusion So, can buzz marketing be effective in the long-term perspective and, consequently, yield long-term positive result for the company and brand? It certainly can but only if buzz marketing is only one of the channels and tools used by marketing specialists. Of course if we only rely upon buzz marketing and do not use anything else, the result can be quite unpredictable. It is very important to create a proper “context” for any information that is being released into the outer environment. References 1. Hughes, M. (2005) Buzzmarketing: Get People to Talk About Your Stuff. Penguin, New York. 2. Khermouch, G. and Green, J. (2001, July 30). “Buzz Marketing: Suddenly This Stealth Strategy Is Hot – but Its Still Fraught with Risk”, Business Week online. Retrieved August 31, 2009 from: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_31/b3743001.htm Read More