Power to the People!

Listen up, consumers! If you have not already realized it, we are in a new age of marketing. And if this new age could be summed up by four words, it would be: “You’ve got the power!”

Roy Wollen spoke to us this week about how marketers must use inbound marketing to (1) create trust (2) capture information (3) deepen financial relationships and (4) create an emotional connection between the customer with the product and brand. The consistent theme throughout Wollen’s lecture and the idea of successfully using inbound marketing is that the power is ultimately in the hands of the consumer.

We must therefore give consumers a customized experience and a reason for those consumers to pass the message of the product onto their social network. In order to do this, I argue that marketers should use their product to help consumers build a story about how and why that product adds value to the consumers’ lives. Stories are how we pass ideas and messages onto our friends and stories are memorable. Thus, inbound marketing campaigns can be strengthen through stories perpetuated by consumers.

A great example of the paradigm shift Wollen spoke about and the power of storytelling is a marketing campaign held by Questus, a 50-person agency that specializes in digital media. Jeff Rosenblum, co-founder of Questus, created the company with a desire to end the trend of companies using advertising to cover up the inadequacies of their products. Rosenblum argues that the internet has given consumers a voice where they can “now sink a brand with a blitz of online complaints.” His advice to big brands is, “Instead of pumping millions of dollars into advertising, why not invest that money into actually fixing your company? Don’t just say you’re great—actually try to be great. Once you’ve done that, you can use social media to spread the word.”

Rosenblum cites Questus’s recent marketing campaign for the Suzuki Hayabusa superbike as proof that this new marketing approach reaps in the money. The Hayabusa is a super-fast motorcycle that costs around 14 grand. Using social media “listening tools,” Questus learned that the Hayabusa was very popular among two ethnic groups, Latinos and African-Americans. Through Questus’s social media research, it was also discovered that Hayabusa owners felt powerful emotional connections to their bikes. According to Rosenblum, “The thing is that you can’t change people’s behavior with social media, but you can use social media to understand their behavior and to accelerate it.”

Questus therefore launched Busa Beats, a website that allowed visitors to create their own rap music over custom-made beats. Questus then created a competition where people could vote for their favorite rap song and the winner received a customized Hayabusa. Not only did Questus use social media to spread the word of the Hayabusa, but dedicated consumers propelled the marketing campaign forward by essentially telling their story of how their Hayabusas were a part of their lives. And through each story, each consumer can relate to each other and further spread the word of the product.

And this is the new marketing communications technique that I foresee may take over in the years to come. Instead of using marketing money to buy ineffective ads on television or websites, companies will start to find ways to highlight and propel the word-of-mouth advertising that dedicated consumers are already doing for free. Who had the power in the Hayabusa campaign? Suzuki? No. Consumers? Yes!