Old Marketing Concept Becomes Guerrilla Marketing Tactic

Have you heard about viral marketing? What about undercover marketing? Buzz marketing, stealth marketing, live commercial, or roach bait? They’re all pretty much the same thing and the latest in marketing tactics. Marketing gurus are attempting to engineer the old word-of-mouth concept into low-cost paid advertising.

In case you haven’t see one of the many stories on television “news magazine” shows or on the Internet, here’s how it works: A company hires “actors” to go out into public places and strike up conversations with people about how great the company’s product is. The key to this tactic is that the targeted consumers never know that they are being marketed to by a paid salesperson. For all they know, the pitchman is just another person on the street or another patron in a bar.

The goal is to generate a “buzz” about the product. It’s like that old shampoo ad: “I told two friends and she told two friends, and so on and so on.” That’s where the term viral comes in. It’s yet another “guerrilla” marketing technique.

The scenario reported on a recent episode of “60 minutes” was the case of a new tobacco company that was launching a new cigarette. They paid some attractive young women to go into bars, light up a cigarette, leave the pack on the bar, and wait for someone to bum a cigarette. When that happened, they went into action talking up the qualities of the product.

Another scenario involved a young couple, posing as tourists on a busy city street, stop a passerby and ask him to take their picture with a camera phone. When the picture-taker seems interested in the phone, the couple touts the product and even offers to e-mail information on it.
The reason why this marketing tactic allegedly works is that the pitch is coming from a supposed impartial third party. That’s the same reason why news articles about your business are so valuable.

So what does this new-wave marketing have to do with farm marketing? Well, I’m not suggesting that farmers hire people to go undercover to pitch their produce in public places (though if anyone tries it I’d love to know about it). Instead, I think that this phenomenon underscores what we’ve always known about the importance of word-of-mouth.

As a local farmer, you’ve got a word-of-mouth advantage: other local people know you personally. You already have a great deal of credibility. According to Ivan Misner on Entrepeneur.com, word-of-mouth marketing is “more about farming than it is about hunting” or, in other words, it’s about cultivating relationships within your community.

Some companies are trying very hard to artificially generate the same results that occur naturally when customers have a good experience with a business or product and tell their family, friends, neighbors and coworkers. That’s a pretty powerful lesson for small business owners.

What do we learn from that lesson? That providing good customer service and quality products, as well as developing relationships, is absolutely critical because customers talk. It doesn’t matter if your advertising effectively brings in new customers. If they have a bad experience at your farmstand, they’ll tell others.

In fact, many marketing experts say that customers are more likely to talk to others about a bad experience than a good one. So, to a certain extent, paying attention to word-of-mouth is more about damage control than proactive marketing. A savvy consumer would know that intuitively and might be able to spot an undercover marketer. A stranger going out of their way to laud a product would seem odd.

There are already plenty of critics of undercover marketing whose chief complaint is that it’s deceptive. I suppose that if this marketing technique becomes widespread, customers will become jaded or cynical. They won’t know when they are speaking with satisfied customer or a paid pitchman. That could have a negative impact on old-fashioned word-of-mouth. People will start to distrust anyone who speaks glowingly about a product.

Viral marketing, undercover marketing, live commercials – whatever you call it – may turn out to only be a fad. If that’s the case it will at least be a fad that serves to remind us of the business fundamentals we’ve known all along.

Copyright 2004 by Diane Baedeker Petit
This article originally appeared in the October 2004 issue of Growing magazine.