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Now there’s a loaded question, eh?
The answer, of course, is…maybe. Maybe not. How’s that for decisive marketing counsel? Wacky for wacky’s sake is fun but its for you, not for your customer. Wacky for the right reasons, in the right place…for the right business? Now that’s worth looking at, from your customer’s POV.
It all wraps around the bigger issue of branding. Does your brand fit with wacky? If so, you can probably come up with an attention-getting marketing tactic that celebrates something unique about your brand. But if you’re a law firm, it probably doesn’t make much sense.
An article in an old Entrepreneur Magazine caught my eye. The author lists 10 "crazy marketing stunts." Frankly, I think most of them are bad ideas. Which doesn’t make the concept a bad one — but it does point out that being silly for silly’s sake also speaks volumes about your brand. So be wacky mindfully.
The Travelocity Gnome…great idea. It fits their brand. The lizard with the accent and the funny commercials — Geico has done a great job of making themselves different from all the other insurance guys — much like their AFLAC competitors have done with the duck.
So don’t discount wacky. But do it for the right reason. Because it fits your brand.
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Hello Drew:
I would not discount creating events and ideas around customers — only if the company is set up to think genuinely that way. I would expand on your point about brand to go all the way to culture. If the company culture is not conducive, the ‘stunts’ will be seen just as that.
The ideas in the article are not that crazy, maybe not imaginative or custom enough. That is the thing with creating new stuff, it takes more work, does not offer guarantees it will pay off (at least in the short term), and is perceived as risky.
Valeria,
Ohhh, I am not discounting events or ideas that are customercentrtic. In fact, if they are not — why bother having them?
And I also agree that it tracks all teh way back to culture.
My point was — sometimes you have a wacky culture and sometimes you don’t. People need to know their own culture (both from internal and external perspectives) before they get all wacky.
And I thought the ideas in the article were a little vanilla and trite. You could slap the name of any business on them and so there was nothing “branded” about them.
Drew