teachthe4ps.com - For instructors of marketing.

Are you familiar with the Will it Blend video series from blender-maker Blendtec?  Will it Blend is one of the granddaddies of viral video. The ongoing campaign (the latest video is the 100th in the series) has more than 117 million views as of July 2010. The background story is great — you can get some background at “willitblend.com:  Speaking through YouTube,” (Forrester empowered blog, July 10, 2007) or via a pretty detailed Wikipedia page that includes a list of all 100 different episodes.    See more videos at the Will it Blend site or search it on YouTube.

The viral videos are funny, but each reinforces the positioning of a $400 blender.  The humor gets the videos “pass along.”  Will it Blend has been quite successful achieving at least two promotion objectives – building awareness and reinforcing positioning.

Here at Teach the 4 Ps, we have enjoyed following the success of Old Spice’s viral campaign.  Well, now we see the inevitable combination of these two favorites — and we find it pretty funny.  It will probably be more fun to show in class if you have previously viewed and talked about the original Blendtec/Will it Blend story.  I have shown both in my classes — and plan to show the new video in class this week.

I really enjoy Jonah Lehrer’s science writing.  His books, articles and Blog (The Frontal Cortex at Wired magazine) are among my favorite readings.  He has a talent for identifying interesting scientific findings, boiling them down to their essence, and then communicating them in an accessible manner.  Some of Lehrer’s favorite topics are decision making.

A recent blog post “The Buzz on Buzz” describes a study by Northwestern University professor Brian Uzzi and colleagues on how buzz or word-of-mouth spreads.  Uzzi’s findings suggest that word-of-mouth is important — at least for movies — and suggest marketing managers reconsider their promotion budget.

The new buzz research has important implications for marketing. While the old model of advertising is all about reaching individual consumers—that’s why companies spend millions for a 15-second Super Bowl ad—Mr. Uzzi argues that future strategies should focus on getting consumers to spread the message themselves. “Thanks to social-networking sites, kids today are more connected than ever,” he adds. “They’re also much better at ignoring conventional ads, which means that the only way to reach them is with buzz.”

Regular readers of Teach the 4 Ps know that one of our favorite topics is Facebook.  One of the reasons we write this blog is to help instructors stay up to date.  Many marketing practices are changing quickly — too fast for our text books to keep up.  So here is another update on Facebook.  This Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover story “Facebook Sells Your Friends” (September 22, 2010) gives you the latest on how marketers use Facebook.  All this just in time for the new movie about Facebook’s founders- “The Social Network.”

I really like this new viral video, ‘A hunter shoots a bear!” The viral video for Tipp-Ex (a German brand of correction fluid – think Wite Out) got more than 2 million hits in one week to jump to number one on the AdAge Viral Video Chart (September 10).  The video is funny (if you get by all the cursing) and integrates the product in an interesting way.

I had the hunter “kiss” and “eat” the bear – what can you get to work?  This will make more sense when you have seen the video.

WARNING:  the video contains a lot of cursing which is not bleeped out.

This article, “Using Social Media to Sound Off About Brands” (Adweek, June 4, 2010) reports the results of a Harris Poll about consumer behavior online.  For readers of Teach the 4 Ps and other marketing literature, it is probalby not a huge surprise that consumers will use social media to rave or complain about brands — though I was surprised to see that 34% of users of these sites claim to have used the sites for this purpose.  Social media was also found to influence purchase decisions — wihtith reviews from family and friends yielding the most influence.

Sometimes I like to show students examples of campaigns — showing them for example a print ad, website, Facebook page, and television commercial that all work together to achieve the same or related promotion objectives.   Over at Social Media Today, Matthew Gain, provides a brief overview and critique of a Microsoft campaign to support the launch of its new phone Kin.  You can read about the campaign and link to examples at “Case Study: How Does Microsoft Do Social Media Marketing?” (May 24, 2010).

I found this to be an interesting example of targeting influencers — because Chevy did not target “car buys” but instead targeted “tech guys”.   Jason Falls posts this on his blog, Social Media Explorer, “Targeting Influencers: A Case Study With Chevy Volt” (March 17, 2010). Jason Falls, Robert Scoble, and Guy Kawasaki are well known in the tech field.  The video is interesting in part because it includes Volt’s product manager Cristi Landi who explains the selection of these influencers.  This is a great example of one of the many experiments in social media that marketers are engaging in today. What do you think? Will this work? Is it the wave of the future?

This could be used in a variety of places in your marketing course — in consumer behavior (influencers), product life cycle (early adopters), or in Promotion (social media). Note, for some reason I was unable to embed this video but you can find it with the blog post.

My previous post linked to an article that pointed out how B2B buyers are likely to Google a prospective supplier — and what turns up is your reputation.  And a single bad act can outweigh many good acts — just ask Jet Blue.  Virgin America had their reputation damaged last week.  Once again we see the role of social media in spreading word of “bad acts” far and wide.  I like that Sviokla’s post on an HBR blog, “Real-time Brand Management — Lessons from Virgin America’s Hellish Flight“  (March 18, 2010) provides a nice analysis and implications for marketing managers.  The story addresses brand management, service failure and recovery, and social media.

As marketers move to social media, they are trying to figure out how to measure the success of such campaigns.  An Adweek article posted this morning notes that advertisers may soon have a new way to measure the amount of online buzz (see “New Campaign Metric:  Social Chatter,” January 27, 2010).

But, “Does Chattter Matter?”  An article in the November 2009 issue of the Journal of Interactive Marketing, “Does Chatter Matter? The Impact of User-Generated Content on Music Sales“  (by Vasant Dhar and Elaine A. Chang, pp. 300-307 – my link will get you to a working paper, you will have to find the article through a library database as it is not readily available online) shows some evidence that in the music industry online chatter matters and predicts future sales.  We could use more academic research to show what types of products benefit from online chatter.

One of the objectives of this blog is to bridge the gap between editions of our text books. Some of the social media platforms being used today were not widely known just a couple of years ago. And marketing managers are still trying to figure out how to use social media like Facebook and Twitter. So this blog provides some examples you can bring into the classroom. Ford has done a nice job, and Grant McCracken describes their success with last year’s launch of the Fiesta Movement campaign in “How Ford Got Social Marketing Right,” BusinessWeek, January 8, 2010.