A New Generation of Marketing Power
Mar 11th, 2012 by yangpei
Marketing, according to our textbook definition is “the process by which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return”. Marketing can be done with advertisements, coupons, magazines, books, word of mouth… The marketing tactic I am talking about is through the Internet. Its power cannot be underestimated, big time!
As I was reading Michael Chan‘s blog, I saw pictures of guns, and they reminded me of war. As I read along, he made a strong argument that segmentation leads to discrimination when people “feel missing out”, it reminded me of a brand new segmentation of an united population that even “outsiders” want to join in. Altogether, his blog reminds of KONY 2012.
It is a well-made documentary on Joseph Kony’s atrocious actions towards children in Africa. He abducts them, sexually abuses them, and takes them away from their home and make them soldiers–to kill their friends and their parents. The documentary is told by Jason Russell, and he talks about what he has heard and seen throughout 5 years in Africa while spending time with one of the child that Kony has kidnapped. Jason wants the world to know Kony, so that the United States government may stop Kony to help these poor kids in Africa.
Under the Youtube video description, it says “KONY 2012 is a film and campaign by Invisible Children that aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.” This film positioned Kony as the root cause for public fear and the proposal of stopping him is done so well that as of March 11, 2012, they got on Facebook, 2,906,823 likes · 404,007 talking about this · 12,340 were here, and over 11 million subscribers, and over 71 million viewers on Youtube. Thousands, even hundreds of thousands volunteers joined the Invisible Children organization to rise awareness of Kony, and on the day of April 20th, the world will be awaken by Joseph Kony’s billboards everywhere! This is not simply marketing an idea and hoping people can adapt it, it plays on the effect of actually changing peoples’ lives and views of a specific person entirely!
Successful marketing is less so done by professionals or big companies who have the money and the influence, now instead, mass marketing is done by the people, the general public, through the new generation of possibility of the Internet. Internet mass marketing has completely turned a traditional marketing structure upside down and gives power to the public. And this, is the power of marketing through web.
Watch the documentary here: (30 minutes in length) KONY 2012
It’s absolutely remarkable how effective social media is in marketing, and its campaigns like Kony 2012 that show it!