Glenbot has a link to a Forbes piece on how Procter & Gamble is using word-of-mouth marketing among teens to push its products — and other companies’ products, too. It’s pretty cool stuff, though I think the P&G folks might be a little full of themselves here …
“The mass-marketing model is dead,” says James Stengel, P&G’s global marketing officer. “This is the future.”
Well, we’ll see.
But it really is prevalent, and there seems to be some potential here. When I went to the site for the remake of the Dawn of the Dead, it offered a chance to join the Zombie Army. How could I refuse? Then, less than a week later, this arrived in my inbox.
Seems they’ll give me “points” for telling friends about the movie and generally doing things to promote it. I can redeem the points for cool zombie shirts and zombie posters and zombie screen savers.
Kinda ironic. Turning today’s youth into an army of marketing zombies, eh?
3 replies on “Marketing army …”
TiVo is a lot of the reason advertisers are looking for alternative ways to reach customers. That and competition from the Internet, video games, premium cable channels, etc. for the public’s attention. Increasingly, the 18 to 49 demographic just tunes out commercials. Even though TiVo is only in a tiny percentage of homes, the future is here, and it’s an age when you won’t have to watch commercials if you don’t want to.
And who the hell wants to?
Finding innovative new ways to reach buyers is the next wave in advertising.
I was scheduled to speak to a high school media literacy class two days after you posted this link to the Forbes piece about P&G’s teen marketing army article, Bob. I printed out copies of the piece, gave them to the kids and we talked about it. They’ve been warned.
Most of them were more appalled by the fact that the teen marketing army recruits are only get paid with trinkets than they were by the fact that the kids are shillig for The Man . “I want money,” said one 16-ish boy, and the others nodded gravely.
Nasty little mercenaries. Interesting to get a kid’s perspective on this, though. I kinda think the longer term success of these programs is more tied to the Zombie promotion than the P&G strategy. The trick is to create a lot of buzz among people of like interests and encourage them to tell their friends. The P&G think is too structured and, as the kids noted, it’s not really rewarding them in any meaningful way.