Goafest:Flying past the 4 Ps to the 2 Is

Marketing students are all too familiar with the four Ps — product, price, place and promotion. These principles have pretty much defined marketing for long. Not any more though. In this age of Twitter and Facebook, the paradigm of marketing is changing fast.

And at the heart of the change is engagement, as speakers through the course of the concluding day of the Goafest and, indeed, right through the ad meet, pointed out repeatedly. The challenge is to be able to adapt to this change quickly, said Andy Greenaway, regional creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi and one of the key international speakers.

Greenaway proposed that there are two Is to tackle now – involvement and infection. The proposal evoked immense interest from an audience sun-soaked and wet, yet listening with rapt attention at the makeshift auditorium on the Cavelossim beach in South Goa.

To Greenaway, who actually began his career in direct marketing more than two decades ago, making the shift to the creative department subsequently, social media is not all hype. “It is a tool that can be used effectively to quadruple a message quickly. It is viral.”

Three approaches
To drive home his point, Greenaway suggested three approaches to advertising — the entertainment model, the cause model and the creative platform model. What binds the three together is the use of social media, which has the potential to take the advertised message to a new high, he said.

“So, if the entertainment model is about creating content, getting the consumer involved is imperative if the campaign has to stand out,” said Greenaway.

Examples of the entertainment model of advertising include the popular 2009 Flash Mob ad for T Mobile, a British telecom company. The ad – a quirky one involving real people at the Liverpool station in London – showed them breaking out into a spontaneous dance mimicking a TV ad for T Mobile. The Liverpool station was forced to close following the episode on January 15, 2009. The event was much publicised on Facebook, while a video of the same became a smash hit on YouTube.

The cause model, on the other hand, goes a step ahead in engaging the consumer, said Greenaway. “Here, it is not only about creating and connecting with the consumer, but also using public relations (PR) effectively,” he pointed out.

An example to drive home the message was the ‘Take a Box’ initiative spearheaded by the Indonesian office of Saatchi & Saatchi. Here, the agency arranged cardboard boxes on busy streets in Jakarta to form the word poverty in Indonesian. People were encouraged to take the boxes and fill it with provisions for the poor. The campaign used traditional as well new media, on-ground promotions and, above all, PR, to encourage people to “take away poverty”.

‘Don’t die. Live’
Finally, according to Greenaway, the creative platform model basically uses an out-of-box idea to excite consumers. A striking example of this: Sony Ericsson’s 2009 hopper invasion campaign, where a flash mob was seen hopping on giant colourful balls in Barcelona. The ad was an instant rage on the internet with a huge number of downloads and related tweets. It remains Sony Ericsson’s most enduring campaigns to date.

“So, involvement and infection are the key, besides promotion and recruitment,” said Greenaway. “Television has been dominant for too long. Don’t die. Live.”