3040MKT Digital and Social Media Marketing For Fun Theory

1. How well does this marketing encourage sharing of the piece of marketing? put yourself in the position of its intended audience, are they likely to share it? You’ll look at sharing again in participation.

2. Does this marketing encourage customer participation? Particularly participation that is rewarding and entertaining?
a. Is the participation on-brand (ie does it build consumers understanding of the brand)?
b. Is it data-rich (ie does it discover information about consumers)?
c. Is it sharable (ie does it encourage consumers to involve others in this participation)? 

Answers:

Introduction

Digital Marketing Mindset and capabilities are applied by various organizations world over. The 6P’s of digital marketing provides ability to create creative, flair, on-brand encouraging aspects for brand (Tiago, 2014). Such marketing are designed aimed at targeted audience, sharing, participation and consumer profile. The scope of the current evaluation focuses on cases of Volkswagen-The Fun Theory and McDonald’s “Kick the trash” Digital Campaign. Both the analysis aims at creating exclusive ideas for targeted audiences.

Volkswagen-The Fun Theory 1:

The scope of current digital marketing initiative was aimed at making targeted audience use more of staircase compared to escalato

Audience: Intended audience for this current marketing campaign, the intended audience comprises of metro railway traveller. The experiment is based in Odenplan station in Stockholm, where Volkswagen tests Piano staircase as the fun theory (Smith, 2011). The new brand campaign targets audience who regularly travel by underground railway to avail staircase while climbing up. The aim of this experiment was to create fun and excitement for audience.

Sharing: The campaign has been uploaded in youtube.com and aims at generating larger audience as it was conducted in public (Wertime, 2011). The video is involving and entertaining with efforts for encouraging customers to involve and share with others. The data rich brand teaches customers regarding participation. Staircase of the metro station was turned into piano by attaching electrical wiring to it. These wiring when touched by stamping led to sound of piano strings as if being touched. People while climbing the stairs out of the station climbed and made several distinct tunes, they preferred using the staircase instead of the escalator. Parents accompanied their children to climb and make tunes on the stairs.

Participation: Marketing initiative designed by Volkswagen was innovative that led to change in behaviour of others (Wymbs, 2011). While earlier most of the travellers made use of escalators posts planting of the piano staircase there was significant change in behaviour of such climbers. The users of escalators preferred using the staircase rather than the staircase. This helped create consumer awareness and communicate to others regarding the experience or change as well.

Consumer Profile: Current digital marketing initiative respects privacy and is not pushy towards consumers to use the staircase instead they provided an alternative. The marketing campaign is meaningful as it aims to save electricity and machine power used in escalator (Chaffey, 2016). It aims at respecting privacy of individuals as there was no force pushing individuals to make use of staircase. It does not reflect any negative effects or personalization of facts. The marketing campaign aims at thrilling consumers through its active contents. The attractive content helps harness participation. 

McDonald’s “Kick the trash” Digital Campaign

The famous McDonald’s Anti Littering campaign has gone viral to prevent youngsters from littering outside the restaurants. Prior to this campaign there had been a whole lot of littering outside McDonald’s restaurants that needed cleaning. Through this campaign youths were encouraged in a playful manner to become tricky street kickers. A video was developed by McDonald’s where users could easily upload their faces and then kick trash into the bin for winning tickets to Fifa World Cup, SouthAfrica. Analysis of the digital marketing campaign reflects innovativeness of the Company to experiment with new and innovative ideas (Wertime, 2011).

Audience: There is a large segment of consumers that consumers fast food at McDonald’s. Most of them were found to litter and throw packages in which McDonald’s serves food outside the restaurant. this created litter everywhere. With most consumers being young consumers, McDonald’s devised a video to target them. The marketing campaign has an element of personalization through participation. The content is thrilling to the audience, who aims at winning Fifa tickets generating large traffic towards the same.

Sharing: The content intended is such that most users especially the youth would like to play it (Taken Smith, 2012). It more like a video game where an individual can fix his own photo or any other photos of personality he likes and then target the bin to throw trash into. The campaign helps create stickiness amongst customers. 

Participation: The content created by marketing is entertaining and drives to provide information to people. It encourages people to borrow it, embed and adapt to it as it gets around quickly. It’s a well-effort turned into teaching consumers regarding the brand identity that helps consumers to share and indulge others also in the similar play.

Consumer Profile: Video created for digital marketing is targeted at youth profile specifically football fans (Royle, 2014). When consumers are downloading this video to play, it is automatically having access to user’s personal information. Meaning this video or campaign is not seeking consumer permission, hence they are not obtaining consent from consumers before openly using it. The video is providing rich-data as consumer’s are entertained by using this game. It is an innovative endeavor that can create direct communication with consumers. Thus, interaction between McDonald’s and consumers along with engagement is rapidly increasing. Visitors to the McDonald’s restaurant were found to litter less as they associated themselves to scoring high and winning Fifa tickets.

Reference Lists

Chaffey, D. &.-C. (2016). Digital marketing. Pearson.

Chester, J. &. (2008). Interactive food and beverage marketing: Targeting children and youth in the digital age (No. id: 1810).

Royle, J. &. (2014). The digital marketing skills gap: Developing a Digital Marketer Model for the communication industries. International Journal of Information Management, 65-73.

Smith, K. T. (2011). Digital marketing strategies that Millennials find appealing, motivating, or just annoying. Journal of Strategic Marketing, 489-499.

Taken Smith, K. (2012). Longitudinal study of digital marketing strategies targeting Millennials. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 86-92.

Tiago, M. T. (2014). Digital marketing and social media: Why bother? Business Horizons, 703-708.

Wertime, K. &. (2011). DigiMarketing: The essential guide to new media and digital marketing. John Wiley & Sons.

Wymbs, C. (2011). Digital marketing: The time for a new “academic major” has arrived. Journal of Marketing Education, 93-106.