Kewpie Tarako: perfect viral marketing campaign example

An important marketing lesson here, and some fun at the same time…

This video is weird, but not disgusting in any way. It has a cheesy and repetitive song that won’t go out of your mind for the next 5h! It is great in its weirdness so people will pass it on like crazy. It appeals to children and their parents…perfect! It also intrigues you…”what the hell is this all about?” until you learn what it is, and then you tell others about it…
(I think that the Japanese are so “special” that this is a normal commercial for them and maybe the creators didn’t make it to be “viral”!)

and don’t miss the (creepy!) invading red tolls army 30 secs commercials, where the association with the brand and product are well done and easy to remember:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZIwQTo973w&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4HpJ1G0ovg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5QlQkojQYI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAmbua43_wk&feature=related

and a line of toys and merchandise associated with the campaign…genius!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qI-KWAK8EE&feature=related

March 12, 2008 · Filed Under Interesting tidbits, Internet, Marketing, Power Phrases, Persuasion

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Negotiating: how much should we offer to maximise acceptance?

Why people believe weird things about money - Los Angeles Times

Would you rather be A or B?

A is waiting in line at a movie
theater. When he gets to the ticket window, he is told that as he is
the 100,000th customer of the theater, he has just won $100.

B
is waiting in line at a different theater. The man in front of him wins
$1,000 for being the 1-millionth customer of the theater. Mr. B wins
$150.

Amazingly, most people said that they would prefer to be A. In other words, they would rather forgo $50 in order to alleviate the feeling of regret that comes with not winning the thousand bucks. Essentially, they were willing to pay $50 for regret therapy.

(…) How much should you offer? Why not suggest a $90-$10 split? If your
game partner is a rational, self-interested money-maximizer — the very
embodiment of Homo economicus – he isn’t going to turn down a
free 10 bucks, is he? He is. Research shows that proposals that offer
much less than a $70-$30 split are usually rejected.

January 14, 2008 · Filed Under Business, Interesting tidbits, Power Phrases, Persuasion, Society

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Virtual worlds, attitude changes and persuasion power

Very interesting discoveries in the fields of psychology and persuasion:

ELECTABLE LIKE ME: The power of
digital imaging raises the specter of manipulation. When photos of
undecided voters were partially morphed into those of candidates, the
voters would prefer a candidate with whom they’d been melded, but could
not detect that the photo contained their own face.

:

STANFORD Magazine: January/February 2008 > Features > Virtual Reality

Courtesy Virtual Human Interaction LabThis form of pretending is so powerful that what happens online doesn’t necessarily stay online, Bailenson argues. Experiments in his lab have shown that what you experience as your digital doppelgänger lingers after you power down the PC—and bleeds into your real-life identity, at least for a while. His Stanford research team has begun exploring how those virtual experiences might be used to tweak who you are, for better or worse.


Bailenson’s lab has found, you can make your avatar seem to gaze at
multiple people; they’ll pay more attention than they would in a
face-to-face conversation, and be twice as likely to agree with you.

Yee describes an experiment in which people who were given taller
avatars behaved more aggressively in a virtual bargaining task than
people with shorter avatars. When the subjects later repeated the task
with a real person, “people who had been in taller avatars continued to
bargain more aggressively face-to-face.”

  • seeing Future Me made Present Me worry about retirement for weeks afterward. Ersner-Hershfield imagines that if bonding with your futurized image
    encourages saving, retirement planners or banks might be able to use a
    less-intrusive application—say, by virtually aging a photo that clients
    upload to a website—to spur Americans’ moribund saving habits.

  • subjects who watch their own avatar run on a treadmill are more active
    the next day than subjects who see a stranger’s avatar run, or who see
    themselves stand still.
  • Ahn: because people tend to take what they see online at face value,
    can their behavior be shaped by deliberately false information? Ahn’s
    developing a test in which subjects’ faces are Photoshopped directly
    into ads, or partially morphed with the faces of other endorsers.

The implications of this kind of work are mind-boggling and a little
creepy: is this online game of let’s pretend ultimately empowering,
because we can be anything we want, or potentially sinister, because we
can be so easily manipulated by unseen hands?

January 13, 2008 · Filed Under Business, Future, Power Phrases, Persuasion, Society, Technology

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How not to handle a layoff: the Tesla case

Good and timely PR advice:

How NOT to handle a layoff, via Tesla « FoundRead

In an unfortunate lapse of good judgment, Tesla’s spokesperson Darryl Siry told VentureBeat there was no reason to worry and added, rather defensively, it seems:

“We’re letting go of people who are either not the best on the team, or are working on something that is not a priority,” he said in an interview.

(…)

ONE: Don’t ever publicly diminish your outgoing staffers. Ever. You might think they’re not “the best” but don’t say so. Say nothing about those you’ve fired. Use the little time/space you have on the record with the press to focus on the positive forward movement that whatever change you’re making will have on your company.

For example: “We’re very enthusiastic about the upcoming release of [our product]. We’re grateful for the hard work of everyone who has helped [the company] come this far, including those leaving the company today. With this streamlined team we are better-organized to deliver [our product] successfully, and on time. Everyone at [the company] is reinvigorated for this challenge.”

January 13, 2008 · Filed Under Business, Power Phrases, Persuasion

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Good “comments” link

Instead of “comments” at the end of a blog post, I found this, which looks far more persuasive:

Welcome to the Reader Forum
Please feel free to express your opinions and share your ideas by adding a comment to this article.

December 3, 2007 · Filed Under Power Phrases, Persuasion

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