This memorable line from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar has taken a relevant spin in the marketing communication arena. Creating the buzz has become a major goal for marketers wanting to generate the awareness, sale, or loyalty for products or services. There’s a science to buzz creation. And as Judy Lewis, VP, Strategic Objectives of Canada and one of the speakers in the recently concluded International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) conference in Los Angeles, California revealed, there are five golden rules of engagement – innovation, integration, credibility, relevance and measurability.
Innovation is looking for big ideas and better solutions. It brings big results that allow the buzzed-brand to have a competitive advantage. Integration is being able to put together a variety of approaches, where the marketing movers are "singing from the same hymn book." Credibility, on the other hand, is the ability of the buzz creators to establish believability for the brand leading to trial, adoption or relationship building, while relevance pertains to the importance of the buzz efforts to the mindset, lifestyle, careers or business endeavors of a targeted public. Measurability translates to the capacity to determine levels of success or failure.
Wading through the sea of idea buzzers encountered in the LA conference and this writer’s side trips to Washington DC and New York, a few buzz marketing ideas are worth sharing. Thanks to Andrew Postman who described himself as an irreverently inclined feature writer for Washington Post.
Dingy tunnel walls turned into plush revenue centers. A series of metal boxes can be installed side by side in dark, stark subway tunnel walls. The boxes contain backlit compressed images that when a train speeds past, the images appear to passengers inside the train to move, like a child’s flip book.
Clouds as ad medium. Have we thought of using a bunch of powerful klieg lights and projecting the image of our brand up, up in the sky? This can work especially if the clouds are the puffy cumulus kind, shot through with the late-afternoon sunlight. How transcendent would that be? Indeed with this idea, the sky’s no limit.
Soles of shoes. We look at thousands of them every day – when strangers cross legs on the bus, at work, in church, in group meetings, in the gym or in public gatherings. They are empty billboards yelling to be scrawled on. In fact, Paul Simon sang about the girl with "diamonds on the soles of her shoes." De Beers? Christine’s? La Elegancia, maybe?
Symphonic "rests." A long time ago, composers such as Beethoven and Mozart overused the "rest" symbol to indicate a short break between one musical phrase and the next. Whatever. We have to assume they had their reasons. But just because 100 members of the Philharmonic are occupationally obligated to take these two to five second hiatuses doesn’t mean that the audience can’t be treated to a crisply delivered pitch for pension plan brand. Or the fluegelhorn player can’t quickly paraphrase the jingle of a soft drink brand.
And speaking of new marketing applications and styles, trendwatching.com sent Commonness a list of three pretty cool stuff that we can all learn from and maybe generate business opportunities from.
Canon, Sony and Hewlett-Packard (HP) are prime examples of brands that are in the forefront of the Generation C boom. Canon sells its cameras with a pitch to aspiring directors and photographers that professional digital photography is no longer just for professionals, while Sony talks directly to home movie directors and DVD producers urging them to experiment with their units. HP spends $300 million on a campaign telling consumers, "It’s all about You" – and "You" should be taking your own pictures, sharing or forwarding what "You" have taken and printing them. "You" may even post photographic essays on a HP website. State-of-the-art camera-phones also entice the Generation C consumers to go snap-crazy with their equipment, uploading pictures to dedicate multi-media locations.
The marvel of the Generation C is linked-up with four other Cs – Creativity, Casual Collapse, Control and Celebrity. Creativity is an obvious link. We’re all artists and inherently creative, whether we recognize it or not. That creativity normally leads to content development. Casual collapse is the death of many beliefs, rituals, formal requirements and laws modern societies have held dear. More creative lifestyles and careers have taken over the conservative and traditional ways of doing things. Generation C looks at being an artist, writer or performer as lucrative careers, not as dead-end road to poverty, starvation or family scandal.
Control is one of our basic needs. To be in-charge, to be master of one’s destiny is what we crave for. So to make a big leap into the world of business, we happily find that we increasingly have control over what we buy and whom we buy it from. If we connect this to Generation C, we’ll see a shift from straightforward consumption to customization, or even co-production. Celebrity is the last C. Not much has changed since Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame. We all have the desire, secretly or openly, to be almost famous, or better yet a celebrity. What has changed, though, is that the implied waiting time to capture one’s precious celebrity moment is over. Members of Generation C can now produce, display and distribute to millions their own images, creations or contents, and get the desired stardom, albeit short-lived.
What was once a selling tool for conference organizers, luxury carmakers, and real-estate developers, and booksellers, is now a marketing wonder, enticing moneyed and not-so-moneyed prospects to pre-purchase, or at least indicate an intention to buy everything from DVDs to waffle makers to the latest cell phone model. Getting a discount or an early bird rate is not necessarily a consideration here. Some of us may actually have the propensity to pay premium as long as we get what we want the moment the preordered product or service becomes available.
Amazon capitalized on its massive online reach to sell Harry Potter books on an early bird scheme. Former US president Bill Clinton’s long awaited memoir My Life has been preordered and is predicted to be one of the most buzzed about books for 2004. Nokia, Mazda and many other established or startup brands are picking up the trend since its advantages demonstrably impact on the business. The buzz that Early Birding creates attract cash-rich early adopters, generating pre-distribution cash flow, and enabling companies to measure levels of interest and bring in new customers.
Business buzz communication trends and ideas are no doubt interactive in nature. Our approach can be influenced largely by the Chinese proverb: "We hear, and we forget. We see, and we remember. We do, and we understand."