The sausage campaign was organized by a small, three-year-old company in Boston called BzzAgent, but that firm is hardly the only entity to have concluded that the most powerful forum for consumer seduction is not TV ads or billboards but rather the conversations we have in our everyday lives
They are all attempts, in one way or another, to break the fourth wall that used to separate the theater of commerce, persuasion and salesmanship from our actual day-to-day life. To take what may be the most infamous example, Sony Ericsson in 2002 hired 60 actors in 10 cities to accost strangers and ask them: Would you mind taking my picture? Those who obliged were handed, of course, a Sony Ericsson camera-phone to take the shot, at which point the actor would remark on what a cool gadget it was. And thus an act of civility was converted into a branding event.
BzzAgent currently has more than 60,000 volunteer agents in its network. Tremor, a word-of-mouth operation that is a division of Procter & Gamble (maker of Crest, Tide and Pampers) has an astonishing 240,000 volunteer teenagers spreading the word about everything from toothbrushes to TV shows
In finding thousands of takers, perfectly willing to use their own creativity and contacts to spread the good news about, for instance, Al Fresco sausage, it has turned commercial influence into an open-source project. It could be thought of as not just a marketing experiment but also a social experiment.
It has done campaigns for a wide array of goods, and for major companies and brands like Anheuser-Busch, Lee Jeans, Ralph Lauren, even DuPont
What, I asked her, if not the potential to get some free prizes for effort, made her bother to volunteer with BzzAgent? First, she told me, she gets the chance to sample new products shortly before they hit the stores, so she gets to feel a bit like an insider. Second, she has always liked to give people her opinion about what she's reading or what products she's using, and BzzAgent gives her more to talk about. Third, if she does like something, then telling other people is helpful to them. So participating is both a chance to weigh in and be heard, and also something close to an act of altruism.
The researchers also looked at the tendency of marketing efforts to focus on ''opinion leaders,'' who often gain that social status by way of expertise. The results here were somewhat mixed, in an interesting way. A loyal opinion leader -- someone who was seen by her social network as an expert on restaurants and who was also a Rock Bottom fan -- was pretty effective; if that restaurant expert was ambivalent about Rock Bottom, she was of little use. In contrast, it didn't really matter if the nonloyal agents knew much about restaurants. What mattered was that they told a lot of people (and presumably that they were enthusiastic). The implication is that it doesn't matter if you know what you're talking about, as long as you are willing to talk a lot.
In another experiment, conducted in the early 1990's by a psychology professor at the University of Louisville, two groups of subjects were given nine similarly valued objects and asked to rate the desirability of each. The group that was informed in advance it would get to keep one of the items (one of those insulating tubes that keeps canned drinks cold, as it happens) gave that item a more desirable rating than the other objects. The group that didn't get to keep anything rated them all the same. A follow-up experiment found that this ''mere ownership effect'' was essentially instantaneous.
A social market is what we engage in when we ask our friends to help us load up the moving van in exchange for pizza. The research suggests that we are likely to get a better effort out of our friends under the social-market scenario than by offering the cash equivalent of the pizza
Almost all of the BzzAgents I interviewed made this point. ''In marketing, obviously, those people are paid to pump a product, whereas I'm not really getting paid to do this,'' Bollaert, the agent from Brooklyn, explained. ''I don't talk about a product if I don't feel strongly about it. I'll give my honest opinion.'
Paying people to promote products, hiring supermodels to show up in a bar and request a particular vodka, is ''disingenuous, dishonest and almost unethical,'' and it represents a subversion of honest peer-to-peer communication. And honest peer-to-peer communication, he maintains, is the future of marketing
It is certainly easier to defend the voluntary buzz-spreaders as less devious than the paid model pretending to like a product in public -- but the honesty and openness come with an asterisk or two. Those suggestions in the Bzz guides to
If your friend is bragging about his great new cellphone, he may not be a buzz agent, but he may not be the purely rational information source you assume. He says it's the best phone around, and maybe he even believes it -- but the truth may be that he bought it because it looks cool and he read that Jake Gyllenhaal has one just like it. It may be true that we trust our friends more than TV ads, but that doesn't actually mean they've become more reliable.
