Marketers: Don’t Be the “Nice Guy”
Consumers live in an age of unprecedented choice. As discussed in Barry Schwartz’s great book The Paradox of Choice, the number of choices consumers have the opportunity to make on a daily basis is mind-boggling. We are told that most consumers desire the unfettered ability to choose and I believe that many, if not most marketers, are affected by the perception that this is true. After all, on the surface, it seems that the more options a consumer has, the more “freedom” he or she has. And freedom is good. If a marketer doesn’t understand this and doesn’t find a way to actually promote choice, he or she seems to be backwards. Or an evildoer.
The Underground is the New Mainstream
I recently came across an article Brown University student Maha Atal wrote for the Brown Daily Herald back in March 2007 entitled “A mainstream that is hard to pinpoint.” It’s an interesting read from a cultural standpoint and a business standpoint as the “mainstream” has relevance to both.
Youth movements from the 1950s to the 1990s, though always championing the rhetoric of individualism against an impersonal “system,” were also always about group identity - young people have traditionally banded together against a clearly identified “establishment” consisting of the government and their parents.
Viral Video: Does it Work?
Viral marketing is an area of great interest to brands today. Services like MySpace and YouTube have created potentially powerful new marketing channels and marketers have shown little hesitation in trying to leverage these new channels to spread their marketing messages virally.
Smirnoff and British ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty are the creators of one of my favorite viral video campaigns. Their award-winning “Tea Partay” ads promoting Smirnoff’s Raw Tea products are funny and entertaining.
This first ad, released in August 2006, parodies East Coast “prepsters” with a hip-hop video and has received over 3 million views on YouTube.
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Drama 2.0 spikes the Web 2.0 kool aid by providing critical analyses of Web 2.0, its people, its startups and its impact on the world of media. Other topics are explored when Drama 2.0 has been drinking too much 1975 Dom Perignon. Read more about the Internet's version of Keyser Söze and find out what people are saying.
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