All the ingenious games, surveys, and diversions aside, with alternative advertising the product that’s being advertised has to be at least adequate, and preferably something a little bit special. If it turns out not to measure up to expectations, customers are likely to react with a collective resentment against the company. This backlash will be even more profound because they will feel they have somehow been duped, their emotions manipulated, and their trust betrayed.

The more delicately balanced an object is upon its base, the easier it is to tip it off with just a touch. Alternative market advertisers know that, for example, it has become easy to ignore television ads: our TV sets are equipped with devices that mute the commercials or skim through them rapidly, or we may simply get up and go for a snack when the ads begin. If people have tired of TV commercials, might we not even more easily produce a backlash against the whole guerrilla marketing genre? The higher and the faster you climb, the harder you fall.

And there have been plenty of examples of falls, when fakery and deception have knocked the struts out from under the perpetrators. Only one of these is the uproar in 2002, when Sony Pictures Entertainment was discovered to have been faking favorable critic reviews of its new films. As a result of this inquiry, during which it was found that Sony was also using employees posing as genuine moviegoers in TV ads, three other large film companies admitted to showing spurious TV testimonials using company employees.

People Trusting People Through Personal Connections

Still another facet of alternative marketing is word-of-mouth marketing. It has many subcategories: buzz, viral marketing, blog marketing, and social network marketing are only a few. The value of this type of marketing is that it seems to create a personal connection between the potential buyer and someone who is recommending the product. That’s effective, because we tend to trust what we hear from individuals who are not directly connected with a product they are endorsing.

Take, for example, a current TV advertisement for Boniva, a drug that is supposed to help prevent osteoporosis. The actress Sally Field is featured, talking about her own osteoporosis and giving positive reinforcement for the drug. When we hear such a popular figure discussing her own health and recommending this treatment, we tend to trust her opinion more than we might trust, say, a representative of a pharmaceutical company touting the company’s new product.

Generally, the biggest problem with marketing campaigns focused on word of mouth is disclosure of connections. We trust what we think is an objective opinion about a product. We also trust a subjective opinion coming from an individual we consider trustworthy. However, if we discover that the "trustworthy" person actually has no personal experience with the product, and is being paid by the company that makes the product to give a testimonial, we may not be so certain that the information given was accurate. What makes Sally Field credible in her ads for Boniva is that she is publicly very open about her osteoporosis, and is actually leading a "Rally with Sally for Bone Health" campaign that aims to educate women about the condition.

Page 2 of 3 :: First | Last :: Prev | 1 2 3 | Next