Defining Buzz Marketing
In the strictest sense of the term, buzz marketing is the practice of creating talk around a product, service, company, or brand. For example, you might recruit volunteers — preferably proactive consumers who are centers of influence among their peers — to try products and then send them out to talk about their experience.
So important has this tactic become that to protect consumers by helping to set not one but two industry associations have try ethical standards.
Essentially, buzz marketing is a newer spin on an older viral marketing tech-nique: Word of mouth. Word-of-mouth marketing is a strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence.
Thanks in part to the increased fragmentation of our culture, conventional mass marketing has lost its luster — and its effectiveness. Buzz marketing has become a staple in the marketer’s toolkit and is being used with greater and greater frequency. The best buzz-generating products and services, of course, are those consumers feel good talking about. Put a great product out there, and your happy customers will want to tell their friends, colleagues, and family about it, thus generating the buzz you’re looking for.
Buzz marketing goes by a few other names: centrifugal marketing, grass-roots marketing, guerrilla marketing, referral marketing, or wildfire marketing. I’ve even heard the phrase “word of mouse” used to describe online-specific buzz-marketing practices.
If you can’t meet demand for your product, that’s a good sign that buzz marketing has worked for you, but you’ll probably never be able to correlate specific efforts to specific customers, as you might once have done with a television or print advertising campaign. Though buzz is intended to boost sales, you may never be able to prove that it has done so, particularly because most buzz-marketing efforts are conducted in conjunction with more traditional marketing techniques.