Viral products - part 1

Whenever I run through my viral marketing spiel one of the first things I explain is that there are two types of viral:

The first is where the "creative concept" acts as the viral agent - i.e. some highly creative type comes up with the idea of a gorilla playing the drums or a chicken that's subservient, and this creative concept is then passed around and brings you brand fame.

The second is where the "product" is the viral agent itself - i.e. you've created such a darn hot product that everyone's talking about it, spreading the message and wanting to buy it.

And its the second type of viral that really excites me.  "Viral products" are for me the Holy Grail of business.  If you can create a product that requires zero marketing budget because it's so darn amazing that everyone's talking about it, then you've just created a cash machine (and put marketers out of business).

So, it was based on thinking that made me think - OK, if we're so darn good at running viral campaigns for other people then why not have a craic at creating our very own cash-spewing viral product and make a mint ourselves.

So we did - or rather are doing.  We'll be launching said "Rubber viral product" at the beginning of December, ready for the x-mas shopping rush.  And over the next month or so in the lead up to our products launch I'll be writing a series of blog entries about the concept of viral products, and also revealing bit by bit what exactly our viral product idea is.

Excited?  I am!

Your mum credit crunch, your mum

Various brands / media commentators seem to be jumping on credit crunch gag bandwagon at the mo  - trying to get us to see the lighter side of the present dire economic situation.  My least favorite of these comes from the newly humorless Absolute Radio - who've been running a series of particularly unfunny credit crunch gags voice-overs for the last week or so.

Where brands and mainstream media seem to be treading on the wrong side of line on credit gags, user-gen communities (as always) have hit it bang on.

This is my fave so far - spotted by one of my Orient-loving colleagues:

http://www.redcafe.net/f8/sign-here-if-you-beating-credit-crunch-209757/

"Suck on my moobs credit crunch!" - genius!
 

Cadbury makes dreams come true

Hot on the heels of the infamous Gorilla and Trucks campaigns; Cadbury are giving you access to the Chocolate Dream Steam Machine and the opportunity to choose from a range of sweet, fruity, rich, nutty, subtle, and downright ludicrous flavours to mix into your very own personalised bar of Dairy Milk.

For most kids (and grown-ups) this is a dream come true. 

From a marketing perspective I hope Cadbury deliver on their promises on this campaign - unlike their previous campaign for the Natural Confectionery Company - which promised free sweets for signing up to their launch campaign.  2 months later - me and whole host of friends who signed up to the campaign have yet to receive our sweets . . . and nor have we bought any either.

Chris Moyles the saviour of . . .

I never thought I'd hear Chris Moyles talking about "consultation"  - but he did just that in his breakfast show yesterday morning.

As a brand of research activity consultation rates pretty low in the general public's perception - with most people associating consultation exercises with village halls, weak coffee, stale biscuits, and even staler conversation.

So it's nice to see the self-styled "Saviour of Radio" bigging up the BBC Trust's latest consultation exercise - and putting some real energy into it.  Maybe this is because this isn't a village hall-styled consultation - but instead an easy-to-use e-consultation without a stale biscuit in sight.

Perhaps as Chris Moyles has now established himself as the Saviour of Radio, he should be looking to move on to save other communication channels.  "Chris Moyles Saviour of consultation" has a nice ring to it (ish)?!

When viral food goes wrong

There was a time I loved Jamie Oliver.  Then I hated him.  Now I'm loving him again.  I'm loving him because he's invented "viral food".  This is Jamie's idea of spreading recipes around Rotherham by getting people to "passing on" recipes to friends.

In the first programme Jamie boldly laid out his plans by drawing out his his nice viral food theory in which within 10 turns of "passing on" all 200,000 people across Rotherham would have been reached.  Simple.

Or not so simple as it turned out in practice.  As a viral theory geek it was clear why his theory isn't working as well (or simply) as he first thought.  These are:

- Make it simple to engage with: Jamie's recipes are too complicated to get to grips with and pass on.  The first 2 recipes that he tried to get people to pass on were meat balls and salmon.  Meatballs may sound simple - in practice they're a pig to make and easily fall apart.  Spag Bol would have been a much simpler option.

- Make it simple to pass it on: Worse than a complex idea, is bad execution of the "viral agent" itself.  In this case the viral agent was a recipe card - or in fact a piece of paper with a badly laid out recipe on it (as one of the Rotherhamites pointed out!)  A Sainsbury recipe card kinda format would have been much better.  Nicely compact and easy to pass on . . .

- Target influencers: First off Jamie's approach to finding people to "pass it on" was to cast his net wide for anyone at all to create the viral effect - which largely consisted of socially awkward single mothers.  Rather than picking at random, a clever approach would have been to pick community influencers - e.g. pub staff, cornershop workers etc.  People who are connected and likely to more easily create his ideal food viral.

Local radio gold dust

If anyone's forgotten how amazing local radio is - check this.  Is true local radio viral gold dust . . .

 http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/when-hardeep-met-les
 

I'm starting a campaign to get Les Ross on national radio.  Think he'd be a perfect replacement for Jonathan Ross (no relation) on Radio 2's Saturday morning slot . . .