Why marketing moves out of the movies

More and more companies are thinking about social media, now the question is why do they do this and how should they do this?

First the question why should they do this. In basic this question simple to answer, the playing field of marketing is changing. A couple of years ago a company would market a product and the people would pick it up (or not) and would talk about it at home, at work or at school. People would discuss something that could become a hype and a company could promote talking about the product in a couple of ways. The most used way was to flood the a target group with a marketing campaign. Make sure your name was for example in all movie theaters so people could talk about your product and possible take it out the theatre. For example make sure you commercial was shown before the movie and thirst where handed out after the movie.

This was a ideal situation when the movies (as we use this as a example) where one of the central social gathering points. Also pubs where a loved place to market new cool products. As we (the consumers) move more and more to the internet marketing is also moving to the internet. When companies could place banners on websites and attacked customers this way is already long behind us. This was a effective way of communicating in a era where the internet was a providing media instead of a more interactive media.

The internet has become a more interactive media as we now can more and more interact with the websites we visit. We can more easily create our own websites and weblogs and every website we visit has one or more ways to communicate with other visitors. We can link websites to social media platforms and provide comments to it. So a product or brand can be made or harmed by the visitors of a website. Possible the website of the provider of the product or the brand or on a social media website or weblog

For example Dell Computers has suffered from a bad name on the internet for some time, Jeff Jarvis from buzzmachine.com writes about this in his book “What Would Google Do”. Dell was suffering from bad comments and bad blogposts, they solved this bad publicity by solving the problems directly from the people who wrote the bad comments. After that they started to solve the rest of the customers problems. After solving the problems of the people who wrote bad comments they started to write good comments and this was picked up by other bloggers and it spread over the internet and Dell getting its good name back.

This is why social media is becoming more and more important, as we start to use social media more and more it is becoming more and more important that people talk about your product and brand on the social media channels. It is important that you, as a company, try to steer the comments and the way people think and talk about your brand. So if you as a a company think you can forget social media in your marketing you will miss the boat.

As you can see the figures above from forrester research you will notice that companies are giving social media more and more attention. However using a lot of money on a channel for marketing is not stating hat you will have success. The thing marketing departments will have to get used to is that if you interact with a social media platform is that you have to get the people to market your product and try to do as less as possible yourself.

You have to provide a “tool” to the platform and have the people spread it. This is some sort of viral marketing, you provide for example a very good and funny youtube marketing video and try to get it into mainstream social media platforms where people will place it on their own private pages and send it to friends and family. If you can achieve this you have won half the battle.

This is totally different than showing a commercial in the movies. It is more like giving all people a video tape with your commercial and hope they will play it when they are with friends. So this will involve making marketing commercials so funny that people will spread it themselves and not only talk about it. The community will become your new theater where companies where used to play their commercials.

We also see this is not only a tactic used by small companies who use guerilla marketing.  Very large companies and brands are getting more and more into marketing on social media platforms. For example you can see a internal slidedeck from McDonald’s. Lerge companies are using social media more and more in their branding and so should you. The good part of using social media is that if it is done correctly it will cost you almost nothing and you can have the same results as large corporations. You just have to think very hard on how to start and who to target. If you have this clear and stick to it for some time you will see that social media can make your brand whatever you are selling.

Tags: marketing, web2.0

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 at 7:40 pm and is filed under Trends & webx.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.