Yesterday, one of my friends sent me a SMS. It was about a recently released Hindi movie. It was so bad that she was asking her friends not to watch it (spending her own money to do so). This reminded me of the session on Pinko Marketing by Tara Hunt, which I attended at the Bangalore Barcamp. The gist of her presentation was “Build a kick ass product, create passion among the early adopters and they’ll do the rest for you”. Building a great product is the difficult step, getting people excited about your product is easy, if your product is good. If your product is good, you can be sure that people will tell others (friends, relatives, colleagues etc) about it, at the same time, if your product is bad, you can be equally sure that people will tell others about it. Its the latter, in the case of this Hindi movie.
These days, the common man is bombarded with ads everywhere - on the television (we rarely see a full over during a cricket match, its always 5 ball overs, thanks to ads), bill boards, mobiles and on the internet, every available inch is filled with ads. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against advertising, or making money through ads if you own a blog or website. I’m just wondering the effectiveness of advertising these days. For example, I rarely click on Adsense ads, I’ve become “ad blind”. Thats why word of mouth marketing is such a poweful tool. Personally, I would give more importance to my friend’s opinion, than that of a cinestar or cricketer, simply because they are promoting a product for money, while my friend would give me a honest review (good or bad, either case). If a blogger writes a good review about Riya or Shopify, its not because (s)he got paid to do it, its because (s)he genuinely liked the product. Big companies can no longer think they can crush smaller companies, just because they have huge budgets for marketing.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Scott Lake // Jul 10, 2006 at 7:47 pm
You’re absolutely right. Word of mouth is the ultimate advertising force and no one controls it. These days you have to actually create something worth blogging about in order to get noticed. You can’t just buy and viral marketing campaign. It’s ok big companies can continue spending money on marketing and we’ll continue trying to make cools stuff.
2 vijay // Jul 12, 2006 at 4:57 pm
yeah, absolutely true. Most big companies simply don’t “get” it, an example is Dell’s sorry effort at blogging. But things are changing. A good example is Microsoft allowing Robert Scoble a high degree of freedom, at his blog , when he was still part of Microsoft.
Thank you Scott for stopping by