How to Do Marketing Without Marketing

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To pull off a successful brand hijack, you’ll need to do four different things well:

1. Find a great idea: one that has the potential to grow over time into a new cultural norm that will deliver practical and tangible benefits over accepted practice.

2. Nurture your early market: by encouraging some consumer tribes to incorporate the new idea into their thinking. Select an early market market that will be influential and then let the idea start to grow from that base.

3. Enlist your early market to help you co-create the buzz that will gain the attention of the mass market: which your early market will be willing to do voluntarily and enthusiastically if you’ve laid a good foundation.

4. Once you’re acknowledged as “the next big thing.” then work to help the mass market adopt you: using conventional marketing methods that will build momentum and broaden awareness.

Roadmap of a Brand Hijack

Kick-off Hijack ideation

Phase 1 Tribal marketing

Phase 2 Co-creation

Phase 3 Mass marketing

Some of these activities are above the radar and openly visible, but others will be below the radar and require some stealth thinking, planning and execution to succeed.

Kick-off Hijack ideation

Since everything starts with an idea, you need to find one that has the potential to grow into a new cultural norm. For example, eBay was built to allow ordinary people to trade with each other without a middleman trying to take an exorbitant cut. A great idea will change people’s current habits and be driven by a great underlying social truth. It will be a fresh, almost visionary way of looking at things.

Where do you find just such a great idea?

By using your intuition to visualize how things could be if existing limitations were not present.

By looking at social trends and emerging values within society as a whole.

By observing how consumers actually live and act within their tribal groups. In particular, analyze how people are using products in the real world as opposed to their intended uses.

By experiencing things firsthand rather than by hiring cool chasers to come back and tell you what’s new.

Phase 1 Tribal marketing

Once you’ve nailed your idea, it’s time to nurture your early market. This is often a subculture of free thinkers or opinion leaders who are motivated by a quest for authentic products or by a desire to display their social knowledge. It’s smart to enlist these people to assist with:

Product development and customization

The creation of some new folklores

Authenticating that you do what you say you’ll do

Obviously your ideal early market will be people who resonate with your product and who relate to it in a tangible way. You need an early market with the time, the tools and the skills required to appreciate what you have to offer. There are four basic criteria your early market must meet:

1. Your early market must have credibility with the mass market: it must be a place where the mass market has looked for innovative ideas in the past.

2. Your early market must have genuine affinity for the new idea: it must resonate and make sense for them to take up the new idea.

3. Your early market must be willing to participate in the new idea: and they musthave social links to the main market market that can be used to pass on information.

4. Your early market must have influence: so the brand can gain critical mass in the main markets on the strength of success in the early markets.

Quite simply, the key to breaking into an early market is to develop an emotional hook that will pull the early market people deeper and deeper into the brand experience you offer. This will require alight touch on your part as you guide people toward the right conclusion rather than force them into submission. How can you do this?

Declare a new world view: by fostering a belief system that values your product highly.

Soft sell and play hard-to-get: by being a little aloof. If people ask you to go after markets outside your heritage, decline the offer. Be deliberately seductive and focus on those who are in-the-know rather than anyone and everyone.

Create some new rituals, vocabulary and folklore: which will place you at the center of a vibrant and passionate community of customers.

Reward the insiders: and make it difficult for newcomers to become part of an exclusive club.

Overall, tribal marketing is a lot of little initiatives rather than one huge splashy product launch.

Phase 2 Co-creation

When your early market gets hooked, they start generating buzz about your product. This is good because:

Buzz create awareness in the broader markets.

Buzz encourages people to learn more.

Buzz provides credibility and authenticity.

Buzz enhances likeability.

Note that buzz always outlasts marketing hype. Buzz is authentic opinion that will spread from one consumer to another. Buzz built on a big and noteworthy social idea as opposed to hype that requires a media blitz to get started. Buzz is built on a foundation of seduction whereas hype requires fabricated bluster and staged events. Buzz can move a product from the fringes to the mainstream in the best context possible.

In practice, buzz can be described as peer-to-peer storytelling. It can be spread verbally (by word-of-mouth recommendations), visually (by symbols and emblems) or virally (using digital amplification).

Phase 3 Mass marketing

Whereas in the earlier phases an under-the-radar approach is required, once hijack marketing gets to the mass market, conventional high profile marketing is required to build momentum and broaden awareness. Mass markets are inherently conservative and evolutionary rather than revolutionary. By and-large, the mass market follows the tastemakers rather than attempting to be the first to try a new brand.

Serving the mass market is a balancing act. Successful brands take control of the message back from their early adopters but simultaneously give them preferential treatment, often allowing them to have exclusive versions that have unique features not available in the mass produced model. Great brands are also happy to let the market participate in building the brand. Doing this allows the market to add its own meaning and experiences, in the process significantly expanding the brand’s scope.

This idea of market participation in a brand is quire distinctive to brand hijacks. Traditionally, marketers have focused on what a brand is (its functional benefits) or what the brand does (its emotional benefits). By involving the mass market in developing the hijacked brand, what the brand means (its cultural benefits)take on greater significance. To an individual user, a brand with a cultural component becomes more valuable. For society as a whole, a brand with a cultural component becomes part of the overall social fabric as customers changes their habits to accommodate the product. It’s at this point the next big thing has morphed into the new societal norm.

To get consumers to adopt new habits, brand owners can:

Link the new brand to an old one: so the new habit will be viewed more as a replacement and less as entirely new behavior. When eBay was first starting, it ran a road show at flea markets suggesting that eBay was an electronic version of an existing consumer habit. That was very smart.

Lower the barriers for people to try the new product or service: by offering introductory discounts so people can ease into the experience. Again, eBay was a good example here in that in that buyers do not have t pay to use the service and sellers pay only when they make a sale.

Foster a community of users: who can then actively support each other and help each other.

Reward and delight customers: thereby encouraging them to turn a single trial into consistent behavior. Once again, eBay is an excellent example of this in that it helps people run auctions and have the thrill of watching others bid higher and higher prices for whatever is being sold.

Marketing managers aren’t in charge anymore. Consumers are, Across the globe, millions of insightful, passionate, and creative people are helping optimize and endorse breakthrough products and services–sometimes without the company buying in. The traditional ‘big band’ marketing model still works for some–even many-products and services, such as an upgrade to an existing offering. But in order for a brand to stick, for it to have real impact on our culture, it better collaborate with its users.

–Alex Wipperfurth

Brand hijacking is about allowing consumers (and other stakeholders) to shape brand meaning and endorse the brand to others. It’s a way to establish true loyalty, as opposed to mere retention. We’re not just talking about creating hype here. We’re talking about a new template for going to market. We’re talking about a complex orchestration of many carefully thought out activities. And above all else, we’re talking about being willing to collaborate with a group of people you’re not used to collaborating with: consumers.

–Alex Wipperfurth

Brand hijacking relies on a radical concept–letting go.

–Alex Wipperfurth

It all starts with you telling a story, but tailoring that story to exactly the audience you have in mind, and introducing the story to them at a time and place where they will be able to remember your story. It’s all about telling your audience exactly what they want to hear, but don’t know until they’ve heard it. It’s about making those who hear the story become your storytellers, and allowing them to make up and add parts to the story as long as they get the title right and the critical elements within the same ballprk. It’s a damn hard job with the ultimate payoff: lasting consumer devotion to your brand.

–Alex Wipperfurth