Web Marketing the Thresher’s Way
Doing the usual rounds in my feed list led me to discover the Thresher’s 40% special offer whilst perusing Hugh MacLeod’s blog.
But due to a combination of not wanting to blog until I’d converted my blog from Blogger to Wordpress and also being too busy neither did I email my circle of friends, clients and business associates to give them the good news - the offer was only from 30/11/06-10/12/06. So I kinda missed the boat on that one, sorry.
The only way you could take advantage of it was to download the coupon, in pdf format, and you’d need to know where to find it. That is, you’d have to find out from the Internet.
Cue Stormhoek, a client of Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com, who told him about the special offer and how it was only going out over the Internet. Hugh, obviously being a generous soul, posted the news on his blog and with his not inconsiderable readership has become, I believe, part of this success story.
If you’d like to read up on some of the analysis of Thresher’s genius or blundering stupidity - depending on your viewpoint, why not check out Hugh’s update on Why the Thresher’s meme Went Viral
What I found interesting and enlightening about the post was the combination of factors that led to the successful viral effect of the campaign. Now I suspect the marketing professionals would say the factors are all basic stuff when it comes to marketing. But it wasn’t that thought of it. Oh, and by the way, I don’t believe for a second that this was a happy mistake on the part of Thresher’s, no way!
If it’s any consolation I’ve got the coupon on my hard drive, forgot the deadline and missed out too. :(
July 20th, 2007 at 7:13 am
I wouldn’t feel too bad Richard. The word on the marketing street is that it was all a PR exxercise by Threshers anyway…the memo was delieratly leaked to increase exposure for them in the lead up to Christmas. And didn’t it work fantastically well! After all, there’s no such thing as bad publicity…as they say!
July 20th, 2007 at 11:53 am
Yes, at the end of the day, companies will try (some would say inadvisedly) to manipulate social media, but they’ll need to be careful that it doesn’t backfire on them.
Really because people are fed-up with one-way broadcast advertising (some call it hype) or clever variations that seek to disguise what they are doing. People are kicking against advertisers that set out to control the whole buy-in process.
This is why sites like Ebay and Amazon are the success stories they are. Buyers are able to verify/check out sellers before purchasing. And what better way than by using previous purchasers feedback to help them make their decisions.
This is basically inline with my own preference for evaluation using several sources to gain what I hope is a balanced perspective on an issue. And I don’t think my behavoiur is unique by any means!
What the Internet has done is make it much easier for people to do this.
And this is where it’s going to hurt old media practitioners (both companies and agencies) if they don’t adopt some of the better new media practices/tools.
But again, it’s question of balance, and throwing out all old media practices would be a huge mistake. Did I mention the word balance? ;-)