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Social participation

Last weekend with nothing much to do I had to see through one of the many ubiquitous reality shows that are donning the prime time on our television sets , well for starters I don’t like to watch all the reality stuff , but I had to …… because I was sitting with a friend who cannot do away with it , he is one of the dudes who burns 100 bucks per week sending SMSes to his favorite participant , I have always been surprised at the number of messages that come for these people especially when an SMS costs 5 bucks not cheap by any standards.

As the show got over I casually asked my friend how can you spend 100 bucks on somebody you don’t even know adding you never spend a buck to call me , and use the [rather unfair] missed call route ………….., with a distinctively calm version of casualness,pat comes the reply ,because I feel part of the show , I think my vote counts as much as Himesh Reshamayia’s comments (for non starters Himesh is currently one of the hottest music directors in bollywood).

I was taken aback as I did not expect such a response , This guy( a self professed techie ) is talking something called Participative Marketing ……….

For starters participative marketing is a revolutionary marketing model. Different from the traditional Interruptive Marketing where consumers are interrupted and forced to watch advertising while they are in the middle of some other engagements, The chracterisitics include brand experience, interaction[two way], and expansion through viral marketing within a particular consumer community (Reference: Tuna Media).

Well this concept is revolutionary or not, future will tell but one thing is sure that it is  definitely not new . We can go back and look at different examples where people have used different participative techniques to market the product , Harley Davidson cross country races can be counted as one of them, The concept in fact goes back to early part of 20th century when  Harvard Researchers were doing research on work productivity and work conditions at one of the factories of Lucent technologies ,the researchers asked the workers to participate in certain activities under different work conditions like working for long hours or short hours etc , what they found out was whatever be the work condition after the activity the productivity of the workers went up, they were baffled to see the productivity went up for even those workers who were asked to participate in activities in dark work environment and whats more the workers became advocates of whatever they did in the participation mode …………That’s is when researchers coined the term Hawthorne effect (Hawthorne is the name of the city where the factory was located ), which denote positive effect of participation…………..

This concept of participation has not been exploited by marketers anywhere near to its potential ………and the reasons have been different one of the reason has been traditional marketers have not looked at this as a media , other reason has been that marketers did not have access to tools which they can use to run a scalable participative marketing campaign……..

But all this is history with the advent of Web 2.0, which provided tools to create an environment on the web where people can seamlessly participate , contribute agree , disagree collectively on anything under the sun.

And some of the smart marketers have started using these tools to reach to their customers, these tools are making mass customization possible which has been a pipe dream of marketers for ever , we have examples where successful participative campaigns have been started by some of the most forward looking and traditional companies , Sun silk gang of girls is one tat comes to ,P&G has created Tremor wherein they have enlisted quarter a million of students aged between 13 and 19 to spread information about brands (though it is a slightly controversial approach to participative marketing), Automakers across the world are launching contests on popular web 2.0 forums like you tube which tries to involve and engage users with the brand .

The examples are many but still they represent a very small portion of the marketing universe , I think it is about time that marketers realize that if tthey cannot engage there customers in a participative mode , some body else is going to and Hawthorne effect is universally applicable

 

 

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