Is Mass Marketing Dead?
Rodney Reid (OH), Contributing Writer
Issue date: 3/14/05 Section: Viewpoint
But the Oscars are not the only place where product placements are having an impact. Take for instance the television series Sex in the City, and its fashionista star Kerry Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) who had the ability to move the fashion markets with the simple mention of a designer's name. Today, celebrities and other tastemakers are the influencers that are driving brand awareness and usage.
As consumers grow more weary of the media barrage, they are paying more attention to the advice and opinions of people they trust. More and more, companies are realizing this trend and are turning to firms like SMA for help with marketing their products and services to tastemakers. For example, in 1998 Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide came to SMA for help with developing its new W Hotels brand. SMA was given the challenge of creating a bold and innovative way to educate the media and the public on the new brand as well as to generate as much excitement as possible around it.
SMA worked with Starwood Design Group (SDG), a team specifically formed to oversee the design aspects of the hotels, to formulate all components of the W brand from the ground up. "In tandem with SDG, we created a teaser campaign which was a very stylish-looking wooden book that had concept cards inside and pictures of what W Hotel was going to be about," said Magrino. "The teasers were sent to a "Big-Mouth List" of tastemakers that influence consumer taste from New York to San Francisco," Magrino elaborated. The resulting W Hotel launch was hailed by Business Week magazine as one of the industry's most successful hotel launches.
Another example is SMA's work for Moet & Chandon in the fall of 2004 to revitalize the Moet & Chandon brand as a status symbol of nightlife. SMA dreamed up a concept called the "Moet M Lounge" program. The program was designed to capitalize on the trend of converting vacant storefront spaces into usable short-term spaces. For one week in each of its four major markets, SMA converted vacant storefronts into hip lounges that exposed the invited crowds of tastemakers to Moet & Chandon's three primary labels.
At this year's Personalization Summit (a premier event for advanced marketing professionals on personalization and CRM technologies and strategies), Steven Snyder, CEO of Net Perceptions, proclaimed that "mass marketing is dead." A McKinsey Company report indicating that two-thirds of sales of U.S. consumer goods are influenced by word-of-mouth and an ASW study suggesting that 10 percent of Americans hold the power to influence the habits of the other 90 percent, seem to support Snyder's claim.
If companies are holding on to the belief that public relation firms are only good at creating initial buzz, which can be fleeting, they are missing out on the bigger opportunity. In many cases, public relation firms like SMA are the gatekeepers to tastemakers, who are the foundation of a sustainable, powerful - and far more credible - word-of-mouth campaign driven by influencers.
As consumers grow more weary of the media barrage, they are paying more attention to the advice and opinions of people they trust. More and more, companies are realizing this trend and are turning to firms like SMA for help with marketing their products and services to tastemakers. For example, in 1998 Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide came to SMA for help with developing its new W Hotels brand. SMA was given the challenge of creating a bold and innovative way to educate the media and the public on the new brand as well as to generate as much excitement as possible around it.
SMA worked with Starwood Design Group (SDG), a team specifically formed to oversee the design aspects of the hotels, to formulate all components of the W brand from the ground up. "In tandem with SDG, we created a teaser campaign which was a very stylish-looking wooden book that had concept cards inside and pictures of what W Hotel was going to be about," said Magrino. "The teasers were sent to a "Big-Mouth List" of tastemakers that influence consumer taste from New York to San Francisco," Magrino elaborated. The resulting W Hotel launch was hailed by Business Week magazine as one of the industry's most successful hotel launches.
Another example is SMA's work for Moet & Chandon in the fall of 2004 to revitalize the Moet & Chandon brand as a status symbol of nightlife. SMA dreamed up a concept called the "Moet M Lounge" program. The program was designed to capitalize on the trend of converting vacant storefront spaces into usable short-term spaces. For one week in each of its four major markets, SMA converted vacant storefronts into hip lounges that exposed the invited crowds of tastemakers to Moet & Chandon's three primary labels.
At this year's Personalization Summit (a premier event for advanced marketing professionals on personalization and CRM technologies and strategies), Steven Snyder, CEO of Net Perceptions, proclaimed that "mass marketing is dead." A McKinsey Company report indicating that two-thirds of sales of U.S. consumer goods are influenced by word-of-mouth and an ASW study suggesting that 10 percent of Americans hold the power to influence the habits of the other 90 percent, seem to support Snyder's claim.
If companies are holding on to the belief that public relation firms are only good at creating initial buzz, which can be fleeting, they are missing out on the bigger opportunity. In many cases, public relation firms like SMA are the gatekeepers to tastemakers, who are the foundation of a sustainable, powerful - and far more credible - word-of-mouth campaign driven by influencers.