The phenomenon of “Squid Game” — 4 Marketing lessons we can learn from Netflix’s newest global hit series
Whether you like to spend your weekends binge-watching TV shows on a streaming service or just checking social media, recently there was no way to ignore Netflix’s Squid Game. It is one of the most viral topics of 2021 and how the South Korean survival drama got there can teach marketers significant business-related lessons about creating a hype around a brand or product.
With the number of active social-media users at a historic peak, it is safe to say that the content presented to audiences is now more independent than ever before and fitting the dynamics of each platform. With that comes the opportunity for small and medium brands to shine more easily and increase their share of voice within their industry. Why? Because it’s now possible to generate huge amounts of impressions for a fraction of the price it used to take with classic paid/owned/earned marketing initiatives.
Additionally, with streaming services and entertainment platforms slowly substituting linear TV completely and establishing themselves as the new normal for how content is being viewed, we might never experience another television appointment at exactly 20:15 pm watching our favourite show or movie. Squid Game redefined what is possible and broke past publicity records with a show that is both gruesome and highly disturbing.
The success of this viral trending South Korean version of “Hunger Games” and “Saw” has many valuable marketing lessons any brand can use to increase awareness and ideally revenue, proving that there is no one-size-fits-all marketing technique.
#1: There are no cultural differences that need to be adapted for markets if basic human emotions are the foundation
The show is based on the events of desperately poor people being invited to compete in children’s themed games with deadly consequences if they lose. Never have I ever heard of the majority of the games/challenges the participants needed to succeed in, nor am I particularly familiar with the South Korean culture, but the series catches the viewers on a basic human emotional level so that everyone can relate to the characters dilemmas’ and build a connection with them. If that’s the case, cultural discrepancies don’t matter. So brands are not selling products, they are selling emotions you have with the product. And human emotions are generic despite ethnical backgrounds.
Ironically, Squid Game had virtually no press or marketing in the U.S. before its debut compared to all the other big Netflix shows, but it still managed to become the topic of the year. How?
#2: Word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful & influential tools and can be more successful than the largest paid ad campaigns
Truth be told, word-of-mouth is what you usually read about when you’re opening a 100-year-old marketing book; it’s considered an all-time classic technique. Also, WOM is very hard to predict or synthetically create for marketers as a combination of luck and perfect timing needs to come along with it.
Squid Game proves that WOM can be the major leading factor in advertising. Unfortunately, marketing firms can’t really buy or secure word of mouth, so it’s usually done organically, but with social media being so accessible to brands, businesses can now attempt to trigger a wave of trends or buzz to get word-of-mouth going. My friends could not stop talking about the series and when I opened my phone, my news feeds were flooded by countless memes on social-media and entertainment platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and, of course, TikTok, so I gave it a try. A movie series accompanied by trends and memes results in one thing for certain: It almost forces you to want to watch the show so you can relate to the community around you and understand the sub-cultural jokes being told. This creates a a strong sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) not being able to join conversation among peers.
The concept itself isn’t new; however, word-of-mouth hyping up a TV show at such an accelerated pace is something I have never seen before. The moral of the story is that no paid ad campaign of any scale could accomplish the success that Squid Game achieved using just word-of-mouth, and there is a psychology that supports this.
Humans feel pleasure by sharing content with their family & friends that is in their eyes extra-ordinary, funny or emotional so that they will been seen as caring, a person who wants to build a connection or as avantgarde within their peers starting a great conversation about a new topic.
#3: Play TikTok right and your brand is bound for success
TikTok did not only reinvent the way brands need to interact with their audiences, but it also sets a new standard for how companies should approach their consumers. Today, it’s acceptable and even crucial for a large brand to comment on a post without having to be professional; in fact, serious brands that take an informal approach on the platform get a lot more praise and attention, resulting in higher free impressions. But it’s not only about the comments. If you’re able to get lucky by having a trend related to your brand go viral on TikTok, you’re most likely going to enormously benefit from it in terms of brand awareness and engagement if you play your cards right.
Squid Game picked up a fascinating amount of traction on the platform, almost forming an army of viewers that advocate and share the inside jokes , re-creating their favourite scenes, putting a humorous twist to it or just duetting or answering with their own versions of videos to the series’ content.
Further, a survey by IRI this year showed that to the question “which way is most likely to get you buy a product”, TikTok is the number 1 platform to inspire purchases, coming right after after word-of-mouth, so recommendations from friends or family.
The great advantage for Squid Game is that the only way to understand the jokes going viral is to watch the show because of how specific they are. This can work great for a marketing strategy. Make your campaign so unique and specific that you turn your audiences into advocates for the story and think out-of-the-box.
#4: We don’t know what consumers really want until they show us, or brands show them.
The script for Squid Game has been written since about 2009, with years of attempts by the writer to get it picked up, but no one wanted to produce such an unrealistic and violent story. But in fact, now it was the perfect time to release such a show because audiences are bored of the copy-paste-styled shows now available on all streaming services. There is a gap in the market, new and brave formats like Squid Game have quite a good chance to succeed, but no one really can predict what consumers want next until they show us or they get exposed to something that might be interesting for them. Sometimes brands need to break out of their conventional norms to come up with something completely new, rather than doing market research, then consumer surveys, then based on these results briefing of their R&D departments, then putting the product on the market and boosting it via media. As Thomas Edison put it “The electric light did not come from continuous improvement of candles”, sometimes it’s crucial to think differently in order foster true innovation. So brands can either listen to consumers as they will show what they want from a brand or approach them with something completely new, because in reality, humans sometimes don’t really know what we want until they are given something. Best example for this is the iPhone. Nobody requested an iPhone in first place but consumers were happy with their Nokia phones, until Apple exposed it to them.
So have you watched it already? Did you understand the meme in this article? Are you craving to satisfy your FOMO? Let me know in the comments.
