Connected Marketing

Citation

Ostman, S. (2007), "Connected Marketing", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 16 No. 3, pp. 215-215. https://doi.org/10.1108/10610420710751591

Duck, here comes an ad.

Okay, consumers aren't saying this literally, but judging by the decreasing effectiveness of traditional advertising, they may just as well be. After spending over 20 years in the ad business, there's one thing I can say with certainty: It's getting harder and harder for a business to truly connect with its customers.

Think about it: are you more likely to believe it when an automaker takes out a full‐page ad in your favorite magazine to tell you how great their latest model is? Or, would you find yourself listening more intently to the same claim as told to you more objectively by a friend? No brainer, right?

So with most advertising messages practically bouncing off their intended audience's foreheads, why aren't more marketers finding better ways to connect with their customers and prospective customers? Maybe because they don't know how.

Connected Marketing is one book that can provide insight and inspiration to those who have grown frustrated with minimal returns on their traditional marketing investments. The book has over a dozen contributing authors and is edited by marketing consultants Justin Kirby (Digital Media Communications) and Paul Marsden (Spheeris/London School of Economics). Through several engaging case studies, Connected Marketing will not only introduce you to the world of viral, buzz, and word‐of‐mouth marketing (they sound the same, but they're really not!), it will make you a believer in their power.

Is there really a crisis in mass marketing? Consider the following statistics as pointed out by Marsden in the book's introduction (p. xix):

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  3,000: number of advertising messages people are exposed to per day.

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  14 percent: proportion of people who trust advertising information.

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  18 percent: proportion of TV advertising campaigns generating positive ROI.

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  54 cents: average return in sales for every $1 spent on advertising.

Short of a small handful of TV commercials that made you laugh, can you remember the last time you stood around the water cooler at the office talking about an ad campaign? Now think about some of the more successful “under the radar” marketing efforts of the last half dozen years. The Blair Witch Project; Burger King's “Subservient Chicken.”; and what about all those yellow “LIVE STRONG” bands? They all had one thing in common – word about them spread like wildfire without the need for spending a ton of money on media exposure. That's what viral and buzz marketing is all about.

In Connected Marketing, you'll learn how companies like Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, Google, and Microsoft set up seeding trials with opinion leaders to boost sales by up to 30 percent (Chapter 1, pp. 3‐30). You'll read actual scripts from “live buzz marketing” performances that made several products break through the clutter via word‐of‐mouth buzz (Chapter 2, pp. 24‐46).

While Part One of the book deals with Connected Marketing Practice using examples like the few mentioned above, Part Two (Connected Marketing Principles) is where the real value of this book is realized. This is where everything comes together to point out that viral and buzz marketing is more than just a passing fad. This stuff has real credibility.

For example, Chapter 13 walks through some of the myths and realities of buzz marketing. While many think only great products can benefit from word of mouth marketing, the book points out that even the most mundane product – flour – can be brought to a whole new level. By putting your flour into the hands of the most influential consumers like expert bakers, you can stimulate conversation about your brand. Meaning the next time the flour canister is empty, your brand may just be the one they pull from the shelf.

Perhaps the most insightful and practical part of the book is Chapter 15: How to Manage Connected Marketing. It begins by covering two basic issues that should be addressed before a connected marketing campaign can be developed:

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  How do I motivate word of mouth?

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  What are my customers saying today?

Then it describes approaches for creating these connections and looks at the key challenges you're likely to encounter when working on this type of marketing activity (p. 232).

Of course, the whole time I was reading this book, I was haunted by the all‐too‐familiar words spoken by many a client over the years: “This is great, but how do we measure its effectiveness?” “Viral marketing (such as Burger King's Subservient Chicken), due to its online nature, is probably the most measurable of all the word‐of‐mouth approaches. It's not difficult to measure traffic to a specific website” (p. 204). But because many of these stealth forms of marketing are still in their infancy, the book does not delve into many other specific ways of measuring success. It does, however, raise the question of metrics as we look at the future of connected marketing. It is good to know someone besides me is thinking about it.

To quote part of the book's conclusion:

Connected marketing – regardless of which specific term or approach you use – is simply any kind of marketing communication (including traditional advertising) that creates within the target market conversations that add measurable value to a brand (pp. 267‐8).

When you get down to basics, isn't adding value to a brand all that really matters? Connected Marketing does not suggest that traditional advertising is going away any time soon. Nor does it suggest that it shouldn't play a role in a “connected marketing” approach. Rather, the book is intended to make a marketing practitioner think. In that respect, it succeeds rather well. It's a quick read with plenty of great ideas. If you have anything to do with advertising or marketing, you really need to invest in this book. Your success, and more importantly the success of your brand, depends on it.

After all, the last thing you want to hear from your customers is, “Duck, here comes an ad.”