Michael Jackson and swine flu

Salvete atque avete.

My use of Latin in my text has been questioned and challenged by people out there. I have been accused of making up Latin phrases to add authenticity to my wise words. How dare they! How very dare they! Cicero needs to add nothing to ensure authenticity. If you doubt Cicero’s mastery of the Latin tongue, check my words out. You will find as is always the case that Cicero is correct.

You may recall that a few weeks back I questioned why it was not possible to make a universal adapter so that travellers were not required to fill their trolley dolly suitcases with plugs and adapters to fuel their mobile appliances.

It has come to pass. Cicero now has the power to move governments and other supra national bodies. Maybe I am the new Bono. Last week it as announced that the EU have decreed that there must be a universal plug for mobile phones. It is not all I wanted but it is a start. You might think that when I ask ‘is it only me’ that I am having a rant. But as this example demonstrates it is a rant with purpose designed to fill all our lives with common sense and logic. Now all I have to do is convert the eco warriors and health safety obsessives and the world will be a considerably better place. And I seek no reward for my efforts.

The death of Michael Jackson may not have escaped your notice and while trying to detach oneself from the attendant hysteria that surrounded this seminal event, or should that be terminal event, this moment has relevance to marketing professionals everywhere and I would like to draw some learnings from this event. Indeed I would also like to link Michael Jackson, swine flu and marketing. And I can say with great confidence that none of the great business schools will be doing this thereby demonstrating Cicero’s unique way of thinking and approach to improving our marketing competence.

I am sure you will by now be scratching your head and will have concluded that Cicero has now truly lost it. Bear with me and let me explain.

By 7.30am the morning after Michael’s death I had received my first Jackson joke. By noon I had received a further 10 and by the end of the day I had received 20 texts and 18 e-mail jokes, resulting in a total of 21 unique jokes. All were in very bad taste and so naturally I passed them on. It did make me wonder who sent the first joke, where and how did it all start. But my real point is that just like swine flu Michael Jackson jokes were rapidly circulating around the world, being passed on and mutating. We rapidly had a pandemic. And no amount of hand washing and catching it and binning it was going to stand in the way of this pandemic.

And so to marketing.

As I have said before one of the most powerful channels of communications, because it is both cheap and effective in achieving its communication objectives, is word of mouth marketing or peer to peer marketing. And a great way to use this channel is through viral marketing where, just like my Michael Jackson jokes and swine flu, social networks are used to achieve marketing objectives through self replicating virus and messaging processes which get passed on and sweep through the market.

It is surely the goal of any marketing programme to reach as many people as possible cost effectively and by targeting individuals with high social networking potential to seed the idea with a highly creative and engaging viral message it will be passed on and others will become infected. Clearly people out there think I have high social networking potential. I am honoured.

And if you don’t believe this works in real life, let me prove my point. Was Susan Boyle not a perfect example of viral marketing with her YouTube video reaching parts of the world that standard marketing techniques could not reach making her a global phenomenon overnight? And you must remember a Thresher’s money off e-mail that rapidly reached pandemic proportions as the promotion rapidly run out of control though many contend that was always Thresher’s intention? And think too about the Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Gorilla ad which started out as YouTube and Facebook viral and ended up on TV as it became more popular. Indeed many films, records and computer games are now being launched and marketed through viral campaigns. One company, Blendtec in the states, has created a ‘will it blend’ viral where various items suggested by the public are blended in a Blendtec blender, guaranteeing a reach and frequency that multi million pound ad campaigns would die for and a brand awareness that only the Cokes of the world can realise but at a fraction of the cost. See it does work.

Sure the internet and mobile technology makes all this so much easier but viral marketing is not a new phenomenon. Avon cosmetics and Tupperware have both been employing the basic principles of virus marketing for decades and Cicero has been reliably informed that Anne Summers parties work in the same way too though this is not something I can vouch for at first hand.

And so as you can see swine flu, Michael Jackson and marketing can be linked. It might not be a Thriller but it is not that Bad and you can be sure that successful brand virals won’t stop till they get enough.

Sorry.

Is it just me?

If you work in the health and safety industry or have health and safety OCD read no further. Cicero would like to share with his more balanced readers the latest absurdity.

In an effort to relieve the oppressive heat under which me and my fellow co-workers were being forced to toil to ensure public safety, I opened the fenestration in my top secret bunker. Quicker than it takes to say litigation, my competence in this highly skilled task was being questioned and why I was breaching health and safety. My defence that I had been opening widows without incident since before health and safety was invented when we had common sense, cut no ice with the gauleiters who threatened to remove all privileges from me.

Ridiculous. Health and safety was invented to improve the safety in dangerous industries like mining, construction and the like. It was not designed for bureaucrats and salariats like me. In this instance common sense lost out, yet again. The world is going slowly mad. Is it only me who thinks personal responsibility is being strangled?

Have a great week.

Sit felix. Et sit fortunatus.