Marketing buzz or simply buzz a term used in viral marketing is the interaction of consumers and users of a product or service which amplifies or alters the original marketing message. This emotion, energy, excitement, or anticipation about a product or service can be positive or negative. Buzz can be generated by intentional marketing activities by the brand owner or it can be the result of an independent event that enters public awareness through social or traditional media such as newspapers. Marketing buzz originally referred to oral communication but in the age of Web 2.0, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube are now the dominant communication channels for marketing buzz.
Strategies
Some of the common tactics used to create buzz include building suspense around a launch or event, creating a controversy, or reaching out to bloggers and social media influencers. Social media participants in any particular virtual community can be divided into three segments: influencers, individuals, and consumers.
Influencers amplify both positive and negative messages to the target audience, often because of their reputation within the community. Therefore, a successful social media campaign must find and engage with influencers that are positively inclined to the brand, providing them with product information and incentives to forward it on to the community.
Individuals are members of the community who find value in absorbing the content and interacting with other members. The purpose of the marketing strategy is ultimately to turn individuals into the third group, consumers, who actually purchase the product in the real world and then develop brand loyalty that forms the basis for ongoing positive marketing buzz. The challenge for the marketer is to understand the potentially complex dynamics of the virtual community and be able to use them effectively.
Development of a social media marketing strategy must also take into account interaction with traditional media including the potential both for synergies, where the two combine to greater effect, and cannibalism, where one takes market from the other, leading to no real market expansion. This can be seen in the growing connection between marketing buzz and traditional television broadcasts. Shows monitor buzz, encouraging audience participation on social media during broadcasts, and in 2013 the Nielsen ratings were expanded to include social media rankings based on Twitter buzz. But the best known example is the Super Bowl advertising phenomenon. Companies build anticipation before the game using different tactics that include releasing the ads or teasers for them on-line, soliciting user input such as Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl competition where on-line voting between consumer created ads determines which will air during the game, and purposefully generating controversy, such as the 2013 and 2014 SodaStream ads that were rejected by the network airing the game for directly naming competitors.
Positive vs. Negative buzz
Positive “buzz” is often a goal of viral marketing, public relations, and advertising on Web 2.0 media. It occurs when high levels of individual engagement on social media drive the buzz volume up for positive associations with the product or brand. It gets to the point that capturing the attention of consumers and media easily, which catch people’s attention because the information is perceived as entertaining, fascinating, or even newsworthy.
Examples of products with strong positive marketing buzz upon introduction are Harry Potter, Volkswagen’s New Beetle, Pokémon, Beanie Babies, and The Blair Witch Project.
Negative buzz can result from events that generate bad associations with the product in the mind of the public, such as a product safety recall, or from unintended consequences of ill-advised marketing strategies. If not swiftly counteracted, negative buzz can be harmful to a product’s success and the most social network savvy organizations prepare for these eventualities.
Examples of negative buzz include the United Colors of Benetton’s shock advertising campaign that generated numerous boycotts and lawsuits, and the 2014 General Motors recall of cars many years after a known issue with a faulty ignition switch which they admitted had caused 13 deaths.
Effectiveness
Buzz works as a marketing tool because individuals in social settings are easier to trust than organizations that may be perceived to have vested interests in promoting their products and/or services. Interpersonal communication has been shown to be more effective in influencing consumers’ purchasing decisions than advertising alone and the two combined have the greatest power.
A 2013 paper by Xueming Luo and Jie Zhang lists numerous previous studies that have shown a positive correlation between buzz rating and/or volume and product sales or company revenue. To expand further on that research, Luo and Zhang investigated the relationship of buzz and web traffic and their effect on stock market performance for nine top publicly traded firms in the computer hardware and software industries. Comparing data on consumer buzz rating and volume from a popular electronic product review Website with the firms’ stock returns over the same period, they found a strong positive correlation between online buzz and stock performance. They also found that due to increasing online content and limitations in consumer attention, competing buzz for rival products could have a negative effect on a firm’s performance. For these nine companies, buzz had a greater effect than traffic and accounted for approximately 11% of the total variation of stock returns, with 6% due to the firms’ own marketing driving the stock price up and 5% due to rival firms’ buzz driving it down.
Buzz Marketing
Buzz marketing is a marketing method in which a business or brand follows all possible strategies to create a buzz to prompt their new product in society. This marketing method will generate some excitement at a product on a person’s mind and in turn; the person automatically suggests that product to others that ultimately creates hype around that product.
Strategy:
Using Influencer or prompting through a famous Blogger
It also creates a buzz of a product because the influencer or blogger will explain the features of that product very clearly.
Offline campaigning
Offline campaigning is prompting a product, employing person to person communication. This method consists of services like customer care, feedback, and so on.
Rumour Spreading
Buzz marketing is not only done by creating leverages but also by creating rumors about other products. Rumors about other product can also create a buzz which will automatically make us buy the competitive company product to that rumor product.
Online campaigning
Online campaigning has also become an essential method for Buzz marketing. The world is online nowadays, so it has also become a necessary platform for campaigning their product. The company will post an advertisement online at all the social media platforms to create talks about their products.
Buzz Campaigning
Campaigning is one of the oldest Buzz marketing methods. It is done by sponsoring some events or creating their game to prompt their product. Campaigning is done on sponsoring something that is always an option, but there will always be an event launch to launch their product.
Creating demand for that product
All the company follows it, but to explain it better; Example. Lamborghini and other exclusive car companies make only a limited number of cars for the customer, which creates a buzz and makes them sold out very fastly.
Advantages:
- Best reach to the customers.
- Free advertisement for a company.
- Getting feedback and improve that product to create the next generation of that product.
- Selling products very quickly.
- The fast reach of a product to the people