Nice and Not So Nice Marketing Campaigns
Compilation of case studies where marketing campaigns did wonder!
I am fascinated by marketing campaigns. I look out for them everywhere. In this blog, I will be covering some marketing campaigns I spotted over the last few months. I aim to not classify them as nice or not nice. That’s totally on you to decide.
The rise of #Binod!
Let’s start with one of the most popular Indian trends. On 7th August, I was scrolling through Twitter to check “What’s happening” and came across a weird trend. #Binod was trending #3 in India. Out of curiosity, I clicked on it and saw hundreds of tweets asking the same question. Why is this a trend? Where did it come from? Slayy Point, the channel from where the Binod trend originated, had around 2 Million subscribers at that point. Although the video was uploaded on 15th July, the trend kicked off on 6th and 7th August. The graph attached below depicts how sudden the trend was. It was not something that gained momentum over days or weeks. The trend received a sudden push from an external force!
Now let’s understand the factors that contributed to this sudden trend.
#3 Trending in India on Twitter: The profiles that were contributing to this trend were mostly spam ones. There is a high chance it was a paid trend. Thousand of twitter users collectively started to tweet about a video on 5th and 6th of August that is almost 25 days later. Most of the tweets that contributed to the trend were just users asking “What is Binod?”.
But we see paid trends almost every day and not every hashtag becomes a trend. What happened differently in this scenario? Here comes two of the most convenient and excessively used marketing weapon, Memes and People! The screenshot from Google Trends lists out related topics and queries for the keyword ‘Binod’.
The memes started floating on Instagram, Twitter and Reddit. Social Media users who had no clue what this trend was, now wanted to know the origin of the trend. The channel then uploaded a video on 8th of August intending to explain the origin which was their channel itself. By that time, what started as a trend on twitter was now a meme topic.
Why did this work? Memes are one of the most suitable ways to market nowadays. Chances of you sharing this blog is less than you sharing the meme that I have attached in the later part of this blog!
The rise of Among Us!
Almost all of us have heard of Among Us by now. In fact, it’s ranked #1 Top Charts on Google Play Store under games category. I won’t take you into the depth of how it happened because the story is the same as above. Memes did their job here! Internet suddenly witnessed popular Streamers and YouTubers collaborating for Among Us streams on YouTube and Twitch, millions of memes were created and shared on every platform and funny fail videos started surfacing on YouTube.
The graph attached below shows the rise of Among Us vs Fall Guys over the last 90 days (July — September).
The screenshot attached below lists out the ‘Related topics’ of Among Us keyword. This explains how memes are becoming an important part of marketing campaigns.
Mirzapur Season 2 trailer is releasing today and Amazon is following the same path for marketing here. Amazon Prime Video took it to next level and made it clear what they wanted YOU to do!
The best marketing campaign is where you invest nothing and still get the result!
Now let’s talk about the power of communities!
The rise of Duck Duck Go!
DuckDuckGo is an internet search engine that focuses on protecting the privacy of users who use it to search the web and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results. Apart from The Billboard in San Francisco, they haven’t done any major marketing campaigns.
Started in 2008 with a target to provide an alternative search engine, they have come a long way. You can read their whole story here. I came across DuckDuckGo also known as DDG through a blog and got to know more about them through Reddit communities.
DDG’s userbase is quite active on Reddit and Twitter and community support is one thing that has made them strong and popular. DDG was announced to the Hacker News and Reddit communities in the year 2008 itself.
In 2011, they made their first donation. This is what they said when they chose to make donations, 4 years after they started. “We rely on a lot of great projects to keep our wings flapping. So we decided to start giving back, donating to Nginx, FreeBSD, Tor Project, Clamwin, Tahoe-LAFS and OpenSSH”. This might not really be a marketing campaign but it sure gave them a positive branding which goes a long way.
The graph attached below shows the growth of DuckDuckGo in terms of Search Queries. What’s noticeable here is the rise after point F which happened back in the year 2018.
Let people speak for you!
All of the above case studies had one thing in common. In all these cases, the party involved used Word of Mouth marketing and they let the people speak up for them. This marketing tactic has always had a greater impact in comparison to other forms of marketing. A couple of people who are vocal enough can convince the whole group for something. Now imagine this happening at a global level and you have got a perfect marketing campaign for your brand. The tough part here is you need to find people who would speak up for you!
In the first two cases, a catalyst was used to increase the reach be it in forms of memes, twitter trends, YouTube collaborations or influencers. The side effect of this is whenever you rush things up, they often go out of hands or die down quickly!
Among Us developers faced several issues ranging from hackers to servers being overloaded. A simple DuckDuckGo search (Why Google when you can Duck It!) will clear things for you on how tough it has been for Among Us developers to handle this sudden rise to fame.
The Airtel Story!
If you have ever used Airtel services in the past, one thing you and me can agree upon is Airtel had one of the worst customer services. They used to change the IVR options daily just to make it difficult for customers to contact the customer support. Airtel was seen by everyone as the most arrogant service provider. Well, this year, they decided to change how things were! With their new campaign, Airtel targets ZERO questions and aims to resolve any issue their customer might have.
The campaign markets how they have millions of complaints from all around the nation but they have now decided to take their steps towards zero complaints. To support this claim, Airtel has improved their customer service. The way they handle the complaints now are in sync with their marketing campaign. One thing is evident from this, by the end of this campaign, Airtel will come out as a customer-friendly service provider.
Why would I pirate my blog?
I took screenshots of my previous blog and posted all of them on Instagram stories for people to read it without leaving Instagram. In the concluding story, I asked my followers if they read through my stories and liked what I wrote then please visit the link in bio and show support. I raised 13 followers that day and this blog was my best-performing blog.
Recently, I came across a medium post on Why Paulo Coelho would pirate his books. It covers how and why piracy, in a way increases the reach and contributes to sales in several cases.
I would leave with a tweet of mine attached below for you to ponder on.
Also, here’s the meme that I promised above.
