The luxury-goods industry faces one of the more daunting marketing challenges of this holiday season: persuading the anxious consumer, in an economic recession, to spend thousands of dollars on a purse or a bauble, says Ms. Rosen, a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center in Washington, writing for the Wall Street Journal in the run-up to Christmas 2008. According to the daily, in "Luxury Fever" (1999), Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank argued that "the runaway spending at the top [of the income scale] has been a virus, one that's spawned a luxury fever that, to one degree or another, has all of us in its grip." Our frantic pursuit of fancy watches and sports cars, he said, won't ultimately make us happy. Perhaps this is why, the daily remarks, much further down on the merchandise scale, marketers are now opting for warmer, cheerful (and more blatantly manipulative) messages to consumers.
Among many other things, virus marketing is one of their latest gimmicks. “What kind of marketing campaign costs very little but reaches thousands, perhaps millions of consumers?” asks the Modern Jeweler Magazine and says that viral marketing campaigns are a marketer’s dream because your audience spreads your message so you don’t have to. Consider OfficeMax’s ElfYourself campaign, now in its third year, the magazine says. Last December, 39 million Americans and more than 100 million worldwide visited ElfYourself to make videos of themselves as dancing elves. Now the jewelry industry is getting in on the trend with Hearts on Fire’s new viral campaign. Consumers can visit the Hearts on Fire site to create a customized interactive virtual snow globe with their own uploaded photo that they can email to friends and family. The snow globes are cute, with floating diamond “snow” giving only the gentlest of holiday hints. That gets at the tricky part about viral campaigns. To succeed, they have to be fun and largely non-commercial. ElfYourself is silly and enjoyable for a wide audience but does it make people buy more office products at Office Max? That’s harder to measure. Certainly traffic to OfficeMax.com spiked during the promotion. But if you made an elf video last year did you remember it was brought to you by OfficeMax? Will the Snow Globe campaign boost the Hearts on Fire brand? “Our goal with this promotion is to create a new and exciting way for people to send holiday greetings this year, while providing a fun, casual environment to shop for diamonds,” says Caryl Capeci, Hearts On Fire VP of Marketing. “The customized snow globes, complete with sparkling diamond snow provide the ideal setting to ‘drop a hint’ for that perfect holiday gift.” Since most jewelry brands don’t have widespread name recognition, successful viral campaigns can definitely boost brand awareness. And since the Hearts on Fire campaign is not at all edgy, it doesn’t risk the company’s luxury image. It may help to make the brand feel more warm and approachable too, which is no doubt a plus for any fine jewelry brand.
However, the DIB Online portal is somewhat skeptic about the way viral campaigns are sometimes run. It says American retailer JC Penney has created a new advertising campaign called "Beware of the Doghouse," which humorously reminds men that any gift for their partners other than diamond jewelry could land them in the doghouse. With this print- and internet-based campaign, JC Penny has ventured away from the usual holiday diamond jewelry advertisements that tend to appeal towards consumers' sentiment and emotions. Instead, this viral marketing campaign, which takes the form of internet video clips and interactive Flash games, pokes fun at men's inappropriate taste in gifts and their wives' disappointed reactions and consequent retaliations to teach them a lesson. The campaign's mini-movie, created by Saatchi and Saatchi, subtly shows that the best way a man can stay out of - or get back out of - the doghouse is by buying diamonds for his wife.
According to JupiterResearch, a leading authority on the impact of the Internet and emerging consumer technologies on business, viral marketing efforts have failed to effectively reach the mass audiences advertisers had anticipated. Despite the growing popularity of such social media sites as MySpace and You Tube, viral marketing campaigns are consistently proving ineffective in delivering and sustaining a brand over time, due mainly to misdirected tactics. These findings are outlined in a new report published by JupiterResearch and indicate only 15 percent achieved the goal of prompting consumers to promote their messages for them in the past year. Although targeting influentials was the most popular technique to stimulate viral behavior, viral marketers plan to decrease use of this tactic by 55 percent within the next year. While social media sites eliciting user generated content would seem to provide a perfect vehicle for viral marketing campaigns, those initiating the campaigns must dig deeper to understand the tendencies of the appropriate audiences. Relatively older online users are actually more likely than are relatively younger users to forward advertising messages to friends or tell friends about ads. Although young audiences show increased use of social sites, relatively older audiences show increased use of e-mail, watch some video, and should be absolutely incorporated into viral marketing campaigns-especially because they are the traditional target audiences for brands or products.
