The relationship between “buzz” and sales: are you convinced?

Though an educator by trade, I consider myself to be a hyper-aware consumer.  When grocery shopping, I’m turned off by “sales” and other promotional-type marketing that seems cumbersome and inconvenient. I instead prefer stores that limit advertising and instead have consistently low prices, such as Trader Joe’s and Price Rite.  Such stores also have a reduced amount of on-hand stock to keep overhead costs low.  I have a more enjoyable shopping experience at stores with fewer products and no coupons or sales to monitor; the task is clear, objective, and executable.  So what, you ask, does this have to do with the topic of social media and marketing?

Advertising buzz is, in my opinion, a dual-natured phenomenon.  It is something I tend to dislike and fear because the media presence is strong enough to “brainwash” our interests and decisions.  At the same time, buzz can generate authentic, credible advertising when satisfied consumers share their experiences with others.  My supermarket shopping example was used to show that if a product is easily accessible, inexpensive, and high-quality, then “buzz” is simply not necessary to have a consumer response.  However, sometimes buzz – or viral advertising - can be used to increase the brand recognition and subsequently increase sales.

 Li and Bernoff discuss two interesting examples of buzz-generating and unusual marketing techniques. The first is how Mini USA used brand monitoring to develop a unique approach in which the company would market to Mini owners, not prospective Mini buyers.  The authors describe this decision as having a financial risk because once the customers buy the vehicles, they generate cost, not revenue, as they consume warranty service.  This was referred to as true “groundswell” thinking.  The second example of groundswell marketing is the Blendtec viral marketing campaign of “Will It Blend?” videos.  In this approach, YouTube videos demonstrate the high-powered performance of a blender as different unexpected items (an iPhone, hockey pucks, cubic zirconia) are reduced to dust inside the appliance.  The authors describe this approach as having financial impact that proves its effectiveness; sales at Blendtec are up 700 percent since Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” series started appearing on sites like YouTube. 

Personally, I feel like both of these approaches are ridiculous and would have had a minimal effect on my choices as a consumer.  Marketing researchers would most likely disagree with me and I am sure there are financial figures that can prove me wrong.  Unfortunately, we live in an age where these are the types of advertising techniques that create sales.  Call me old-fashioned, but businesses, please show me the true functionality of the product in your advertisements – I can do without the partying, flair, and frivolity.

I suppose it would be appropriate for me to use the “criticism sandwich” method here and highlight something that I found positively intriguing in this reading selection.  (I do apologize for being such a stringent critic of most advertising/social media marketing…although it is why the course interested me!!)

Sandwiches make everything better.

The forum model of social media again has me swooning.  The authors discuss the importance of “listening,” and describe the private communities developed in Communispace.  Communispace’s service consists of recruiting three hundred to five hundred people in the client’s target market.  Those recruits form a community that looks like any other online social network, with profiles, discussion forums, online chat, and uploaded photos.  These communities generate insight because they “look” just like groundswell participants out in the real world, and these participants behave in a very natural way – not at all like the stilted one-time interactions in a focus group, for example.  This is a great way of implementing positive change in product development and consumer relations. 

There is an interesting section of the readings that the authors title “how listening will change your organization.”  They go on to explain the “no-more-being-stupid” factor: listening to the groundswell will relentlessly reveal your stupidity.  In my opinion, this is a prime marketing approach.  After all, you can’t fix it if you don’t know it’s broken!!

What's all that noise?

Here are my concluding thoughts. Viral marketing is silly but profitable.  When companies listen, customers are happy.  Buzz may have most people convinced, but I am unwavering.

source used in this post:

Li, Charlene, and Josh Bernoff. Groundswell. expanded and revised ed. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011. Print.