:: open-source marketing :: ::

Malcolm Gladwell poses an interesting question on pg.92 of his book The Tipping Point. How Little Things Make a Big Difference.

There is a maxim in the advertising business that an advertisement has to be seen at least six times before anyone will remember it. That's a useful lesson for Coca-Cola and Nike who have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on marketing and can afford to saturate all forms of media with their message. But its not all that useful for , say, a group of people trying to spark a literacy epidemic with a small budget and one hour of programming on public television. Are there smaller, subtler, easier ways to make something stick?

Rob Walker writes the following in a piece titled The Hidden (In Plain Sight) Persuaders. This piece was published in the December 5th, 2004 edition of The New York Times Magazine.

... The thinking is that in a media universe that keeps fracturing into ever-finer segments, consumers are harder and harder to reach; some can use TiVo to block out ads or the TV's remote control to click away from them, and the rest are simply too saturated with brand messages to absorb another pitch. So corporations frustrated at the apparent limits of 'traditional'' marketing are increasingly open to word-of-mouth marketing. One result is a growing number of marketers organizing veritable armies of hired ''trendsetters'' or ''influencers'' or ''street teams'' to execute ''seeding programs,'' ''viral marketing,'' ''guerrilla marketing.'' What were once fringe tactics are now increasingly mainstream; there is even a Word of Mouth Marketing Association...

... Given that we are a nation of busy, overworked people who in poll after poll claim to be sick of advertisers jumping out at us from all directions, the number of people willing to help market products they had previously never heard of, for no money at all, is puzzling to say the least. BzzAgent, which has a particularly intense relationship with its fast-growing legions of volunteers, offers a rare and revealing case study of what happens when word-of-mouth theory meets consumer psychology in the real world. In finding thousands of takers, perfectly willing to use their own creativity and contacts to spread the good news about, for instance, Al Fresco sausage, it has turned commercial influence into an open-source project. It could be thought of as not just a marketing experiment but also a social experiment. The existence of tens of thousands of volunteer marketing ''agents'' raises a surprising possibility -- that we have already met the new hidden persuaders, and they are us...

:: you can read the full article here.