Undercover marketing has to be one of the most fascinating ways that anybody can successfully market and promote a product or service. As the name suggests this is the kind of marketing where the target audience or consumers are completely unaware that something is being advertised to them. In other words what the marketer will be doing is marketing in secret. Other names used for this kind of promotional activity are stealth marketing or buzz marketing.
The immediate question that would come to mind is why anybody would want to use undercover marketing techniques. Actually there are plenty of unique benefits in this kind of marketing approach.
Firstly people are generally wary when they discover that they are being marketed to and so what tends to happen is that they will immediately get defensive the minute they realize that somebody is trying to sell them something and will quickly build a “protective” barrier around themselves in an effort to resist the advances being made to sell them. Obviously when a prospect is in this state of mind they become very difficult to market or sell to. They will no longer be receptive to any marketing message, which means that they will tend to miss important benefits and features being described that would be useful to them. However when you use undercover marketing the target audience will remain very receptive to the message and they will be much easier to convince. They will have no idea that they are being sold to and so they will tend to be very receptive.
Secondly because the converted person or customer of the product or service being marketed thinks that they made the clever decision to buy on their own and without any pressure from an advertisement or salesperson they will more often than not be enthusiastic enough to tell others about what they have purchased. The huge benefit to the marketer here is that their promotional campaign will go viral.
Many undercover marketing campaigns have been carried out over the years. One of the most famous and successful ones was done by Sony the giant electronics company. When the firm created the first ever Walkman in the 1960s young people were hired to go round parks and public places all over Japan simply using the product and showing it off in public as much as possible. The fascinating thing about this case is that it was the kind of situation where conventional marketing would never have worked as well and produced the kind of results that were gotten over a very short period of time. This would suggest that there are certain instances where no other marketing technique will work as well and effectively as undercover or stealth marketing.
In an increasingly crowded and noisy marketplace an increasing number of consumers have learnt to shut out most advertising and promotional messages. This is why people will turn off the sound on their TVs during a commercial break or even switch channels until the advertisements are over. It is clear that consumers are actively building resistance against marketing messages and this is a cause for concern for marketers. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that conventional advertising in the media is rapidly getting less and less effective. In this kind of environment undercover marketing is able to easily break through and reach consumers who are isolated from all other conventional media.
Stealth marketing is increasingly being used online on the World Wide Web by businesses of all sizes to influence consumers into using their products and services. One extremely common approach is to use online chat rooms and discussion forums. The fact that ne can be anonymous online makes it very difficult to get caught and so the undercover marketing agent is able to influence a large group of people who view them as peers who have discovered something useful that they too can benefit from.
One of the major advantages of undercover marketing that has attracted so many marketers and will continue to pull in many more is the negligible cost or small investment required against a potentially huge pay off. This alone has caused many to plunge in and take the risk.
Indeed like in everything else in life this kind of marketing approach comes with its’ risks and drawbacks. The biggest one is getting caught or being found out. A backlash can easily result and rapidly escalate to uncontrollable levels. Most consumers will turn from loving you to hating you when they discover that they were manipulated into buying.
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