Mass marketing can be massive waste when your medium of choice is Virtual.
As a marketer you know that you cannot be everything to everyone. You can however, be everything to someone; which is how you have niche markets. Appealing to the lowest common denominator can backfire as much as hoping for a trickle down effect from the top down.
Even brand Moguls like Coca Cola will create seperate campaigns for different segments of their consumers. The same product with the same positioning is sold to different groups with entirely different message based on what will resonate with them and how they interact with Media.
Same is the case with Email marketing. It might be bulk in the way it is set up, but it does not have to be one mass message sent out to all.The idea is to segment your list based on profiles and customize the message.
In this customize-and-personalize market, advertising still falls into a few categories. That is because there are only certain ways that you can appeal to people. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs* really sums it up. Which means, the markets might be diverse and deeply segmented, they can all be motivated by invoking basic, instinctive motivations/needs. Maslow boils them down to: deficiency needs, safety needs, social needs, esteem, growth, aesthetic and self transcendence (whatever that means). So you can scare people into buying your message, flatter them, tell them they’ll fit in if…, they’ll be loved/liked more if they used the product…, help them do better in some way or simply entertain and amuse them, make them laugh or cry.
Take viral marketing for example, and you’ll easily be able to fit anyone of the popular videos on YouTube into one of these categories. All marketers need to do is match the target audience profile with the appropriate appeal and the specific advantages of the medium where the message will appear, and there you have it, a viral marketing campaign! If only it was that easy, real work starts once you get your campaign off this rack that Maslow setup in 1943.
The success of a well-planned viral campaign depends on how vested the audience is in the original message (no matter how wacky it maybe) and how it is delivered to them. With proper seeding this well planned and decently executed message will reach the audience and will take your media budget so far that you’ll forget how little you spent.
These days since it takes very little to produce a campaign, we see all kinds of half baked efforts that end up “friend-less”. Our internet savy audience has become immune to anything that in not out of the ordinary. If you want to be memorable, no, viral, you have to do more. No one wants to share mediocrity!
– Cherryone
*Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation,[1] which he subsequently extended to include his observations of humans’ innate curiosity. (wikipedia)\par
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