Buzz marketing, viral marketing, word of mouth marketing – all of these are terms for what is, essentially, the same thing; the promotion and advertising of a brand using non-traditional and innovative means.
As an advertising and marketing discipline it is now firmly established (and more of the hows and whys of that later) but where did it come from? Why did it gain favour so quickly?
To trace the development of buzz marketing it is first necessary to look at the state of the advertising industry in the last years of the 20th century. A long, lucrative golden age was coming to an end as an increasingly cynical public began to switch off to traditional advertising methods.
After four decades of unparalleled success and receptive consumers the industry limped into the noughties with studies beginning to show, to all intents and purposes, that advertising was doomed. The figures were astounding – it was found that the average person was exposed to 3,000 marketing messages a day, a Yankelovich Partners survey discovered that 65% of “average” Americans felt “constantly bombarded” by advertising, Deutsche Bank reports found that, in the short term, only 18% of television advertising generated a positive return on investment. When these, and dozens more investigations were correlated the big picture was clear – traditional advertising was too obvious, too frequent and too ineffectual to move a public jaded by years of over-selling and over-advertising…something had to give.
In the end what gave was traditional advertising’s parameters.
A few smart pioneers realised that, in order to revitalise the industry, they would have to change the way people were advertised to. These marketers realised the only likely ways to get someone to purchase in a climate steeped in cynicism was to make them talk about a product amongst themselves and create a buzz. And, they thought, the only way to create a buzz would be with the perpetration of actions and events that did not reek of direct advertising.
This is not to say that it was determined that the public had to be mislead in order to get them to adopt a brand – rather that their interest had to be piqued in ways that traditional advertising methods could not.
So it was that advertisers began to study ways to place their brands without overtly stating that placement.
It is, of course, impossible to place a date on the advent of this kind of activity. Indeed, early efforts predate the year 2000 by some distance – just as some reports on the state of the ad industry postdate it by a few years. At best the birth, development and refinement of viral marketing can be pinned down to a ten-year period between 1996 and 2006.
Microsoft, for instance, were engaging in viral activity to promote their Hotmail product in 1996 spending $500,000 for a return of 12,000,000 new users – something unachievable by traditional methods and also the action that, perhaps, began to alert the industry to a change in the wind. Similarly FHM promoted themselves by projecting a giant image of a naked Gail Porter onto the walls of the Houses of Parliament in 1999. But these actions, in general, were isolated innovations that heralded the birth of a new advertising method rather than establishing its dominance.
Evian (the water company) began to refine the new technique in 2001 by sponsoring the renovation of a community swimming pool in Brixton – thus creating an appreciative buzz about themselves without ever attempting to promote their products. Others followed this idea (with the first of the huge international companies to take it up being Nike with a series of charitable activities) and by 2004 and Burger King’s Subservient Chicken email campaign it was accepted as gospel that it was no longer necessary to have any mention of your product (and potentially even your brand) in any campaign – it was now enough simply to create interest and for the consumer public, ultimately, to work out the rest for themselves.
And, when it became apparent that the brand name and product was in many ways secondary to the successful running of a campaign that got people interested and, by extension, caused them to engage emotionally and ultimately purchase for their own reasons and due to peer recommendation or evangelising…well, that’s when buzz marketing finally grew up.