Businesses must offer consistent products, watch customer behaviour closely and resist the urge to actually tamper in viral marketing if they want it to succeed, marketing experts say.
The comments come as Swedish DIY furniture giant IKEA has been targetted as the location for a hide-and-seek game with thousands of participants signing up to the game on Facebook.
The company has even responded to the event. While it says it has notified the police as a matter of course, and that it “is not happy to condone anything that might put our customers at risk or detract from a positive in-store experience”, it nevertheless admits the company “won’t go so far as to ban the game”.
Marketing expert Fred Schebesta says IKEA has the ability to gain free publicity from this event without actually organising anything. The secret, he says, is that IKEA offers a consistent product that people know extremely well.
“I wouldn’t say IKEA itself is doing the viral marketing, and they haven’t done anything specific to promote that. But what you have is that IKEA has worked hard on the product to make it consistent, and that makes it attractive to these types of campaigns.”
“People already know what you’re going to get when you go there, you know it’s filled with little hiding places and the place itself is like a giant hide-and-seek game. That doesn’t charge. It’s extremely consistent in every store.”
Schebesta says businesses are filled with these types of “subculture campaigns”, which become extremely popular and end up on sites like YouTube and Facebook.
“Look at a business like McDonald’s, where people have this thing where they try and eat a pounder – that’s four quarter pounders put together. That type of thing only happens because McDonald’s is a known, consistent product, and that’s why these variations end up going viral.”
“These things only happen if you rely on the company and it’s consistent. It’s very hard to get a whole group together and play hide-and-seek when the product and location is constantly changing and people don’t know about it. You know what to expect at IKEA. It’s a consistent brand.”
However, Schebesta says businesses shouldn’t necessarily directly comment on these campaigns. Customers tend to “own” these types of viral experiences, and having a company comment, or officially interact with them, cheapens the experience.
“A very easy example is Mentos and Diet Coke, which obviously interact when they’ve come into contact. Now, do they condone that behaviour? That’s been around for awhile, and Diet Coke still make the same product. Mentos makes the same product.”
“By not saying anything, they condone it. They’re going to sell a lot more Mentos that way.”
Mocks founder Lara Solomon says the key here is to watch what customers are doing at your store, or with your products, and then try and create viral messages around that theme.
“People play hide-and-seek at IKEA anyway, and that’s why this is gaining attention. I think the idea here is to look at what people are doing in your business and try and create Facebook pages or similar campaigns from that.”
“Think outside the box. If you have a shop that sells lollies, for instance, and people often take a long time to decide what they want, you could make a page saying, “I can’t decide which lollies to buy at X business”.”
Solomon says businesses need to realise the key to social media is realising what customers are actually doing, not what the business wants them to do, and then leverage that activity to their advantage.
“If you have a product, what is really engaging people? With our business, people say they collect Mocks because they’re funky and different and they like to change them every day, so we try and work off that. And that’s the same for any business, just watch what people are doing, and then leverage that.”
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
