Paradise Advertisement

With mass communication being achievable with just the click of a mouse, the internet has become the world’s biggest marketplace. That is why most advertisers believe that viral marketing is the most effective way to get customers to buy your product. As Tom Kinnear, executive director of the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan tells Forbes.com, “It [viral marketing] can be referred to as word-of-mouth on steroids.”

The movie “Snakes on a Plane’ is a good example. While the film didn’t do so hot at the box office it got a huge amount of buzz when people started writing songs and creating videos based on the title. When the media picked up on it, word of mouth for Snakes on a Plane took off like wildfire. This required no effort from the filmmakers after their initial advertising push. That’s the essence of good viral marketing.

You may not have a movie studio or Samuel L. Jackson to help you out but there are ways you can adapt viral marketing to your internet business.

The Fun Page

If you are a serious marketer, and you don’t have enough funding for a major advertisement, this is one of the best techniques that you can use. Make a page on your site with funny or interesting videos or images, or even create a mini-game that is focused on your product. Be sure to include a ‘tell a friend’ link to ensure that your ‘fun page’ gets circulated. Creativity is the key. If your ‘fun’ page is cool enough, you can be sure that you’ll get more hits for to your website.

Kind of Weird

Remember the Subservient Chicken? Burger King created a webpage that contained a ‘video camera’ with a command line below it. On the site, you just typed what you wanted the subservient chicken to do, and voila, the chicken did it. People were born curious. If you have some idea in your head, do it. The Subservient Chicken became so popular that people forwarded the links to their friends, and all Burger King had to do was to maintain the website. The downside is this strategy might create ‘bad’ publicity but as the old saying goes, bad publicity is still publicity. Read the rest of this entry »

     It seems like more and more often companies have been concentrating on a single aspect of the fundamental four P’s of advertising and marketing. Day after day we see posters, outdoor boards and special offers sent out from thousands of brands across the nation. All this clutter can turn into white noise in the mind of the customer and lead them, inevitably, to ignore the message. Promotion doesn’t end with these quirky TV commercials or an eye catching print ad with an offer to win a cruise; it really comes to life through the use of exciting promotional products.

     Promotion, as a tactic in a marketing campaign, communicates important information to the public and helps achieve the overall objectives of the entire campaign. Promotion can include anything from personal selling and a sales force to traditional advertising and public relations. Within all these sub categories lays plenty of opportunity to incorporate a strong promotional product program. Traditionally, tradeshows and industry expos use promotional products more often; however why not enhance these other categories with a promotional product?

     PepsiCo did just that with a campaign known for its advertising and merchandising. During the Cola Wars of the late 1990’s, PepsiCo designed a fully-integrated international marketing campaign the encouraged and used all categories of Promotion. The campaign, known as Pepsi Stuff, encouraged customers to collect Pepsi Point by collecting the points from specially marked Pepsi cans and fountain drinks and purchasing the Points for 10 cents per point. Participants used the pointed to purchase merchandise for the PepsiCo empire. To successfully diffuse this idea, PepsiCo used celebrity sponsored print, television, outdoor, in-store, Internet and catalogue advertising along with top-quality promotional products. Read the rest of this entry »