This week I attended the Conference Board's "Marketing in 2010: Growth Strategies for the Future" conference in New York, and one of the themes I heard repeated was how user-generated content represents the future of marketing strategy. YouTube, MySpace, blogs and social networks were all cited as mediums through which companies can gain maximum brand exposure for minimal cost.
Brian Kardon, chief strategy and marketing officer for Forrester Research, brought up a few examples of how companies are benefiting from word-of-mouth marketing driven by the average consumer. The highly watched YouTube videos of the geyser-like eruption that occurs when you mix Mentos and Diet Coke might have triggered calls for safety warnings in previous years. Instead, now they ended up acting as inadvertent brand ambassadors for both products.
Coca-Cola found the videos entertaining, but not in line with the brand personality of Diet Coke. Mentos, however, felt the videos were in keeping with its quirky brand. Mentos sales were up 14.5 percent from the beginning of this year to September, though it’s hard to say how much of that was a result of the videos’ branding impact. But judging from the number of Mentos/Diet Coke YouTube videos that now exist, it’s likely that many consumers were buying the candy to try the experiment at home, at the very least.
On the flip side, let’s hope that homemade videos of your company like this don’t exist. Here, a Comcast customer captures his cable service technician asleep on his couch after staying on hold for an hour with the telecom company’s service line.
Other companies are turning to their users for innovation in marketing ideas. Netflix recently announced that it was going to customers for ideas on how to optimize its movie recommendation system, which offers suggestions based on personal preferences. Netflix is so serious about the marketing strategy that it is offering a hefty $1 million prize to the first person who can improve on its current system by at least 10 percent, and has made public 100 million of its customers’ movie ratings to aid the process (though the ratings cannot be traced to individual Netflix users).
By 2010, it looks like the notion that Madison Ave. can tell the consumer what she likes will be a thing of the past. Are you still operating top-down marketing? Or are you letting your users dictate what resonates with them?
Comments