Thanks to Agenda for the link to this article!
Four years ago, Tom Dugan’s company did some work for Peet’s Coffee & Tea by covertly plugging a Peet’s promotion online. He’d love to share the names of more recent clients, but none of them, he says, want to speak on the record. "Most of our clients are loath to discuss the work we do for them, because they don’t want their competitors to know about it," says Dugan, president of NewGate Internet, which specializes in search engine and grassroots marketing through the Internet.
Then again, it’s also possible that Dugan’s clients don’t want to admit they’re paying for chatty postings in Internet forums—the kind that NewGate and similar agencies organize to look like the thousands of casual recommendations swapped daily by forum enthusiasts. After all, it’s hard to sneak up on consumers if they see you coming.
Stealth marketing isn’t new, but interest in it is growing as marketers divert increasing amounts of money from mass media to less traditional advertising. How mainstream has stealth become? Last summer California Management Review, published by UC Berkeley’s not exactly radical Haas School of Business, ran a feature called "Stealth Marketing: How to Reach Consumers Surreptitiously." The authors bluntly posited that marketers "should attempt to create ‘zap-proof’ formulas by relying on more subtle messages that are harder to avoid...to reach an increasingly fragmented audience."
In other words, time to get sneaky. Plenty of companies use wink-and-nod marketing tactics, from the largely overt (TV product placement) to the barely disguised (Burger King’s Subservient Chicken website) to the totally hush-hush (a Hennessy Martini promotion). A rash of buzz merchants is eager to secretly kick-start positive word of mouth about your company and its products. But before disappearing underground, consider some words of wisdom from several battle-scarred covert operators.
Here's an interesting example from the article
Piquing the interest of adult consumers was certainly a goal of Schieffelin & Company when it hired Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners in the early 1990s to secretly promote a Hennessy cognac brand. "When we launched the Hennessy Martini, nobody ordered it and nobody knew how to make it," says Bond. His agency hired 150 actors to go to targeted, trendsetting clubs and restaurants that didn’t serve the brand at that time. The covert operation ran in eight markets nationally, with 15–20 people in each market. The stealth reps were encouraged to hang out, order the drink loudly, buy the drink for strangers and otherwise build buzz.
No one from Hennessy distributor Schieffelin wanted to be quoted directly for this story, but the company did confirm that the promotion worked. Over the five-year program, bartenders learned to make the drink, consumers learned to order it, and sales increased by 40 percent, Bond says. The promotion, he adds, produced "new sources of distribution and made the brand younger and hipper."
And here's how Toyota Scion used stealth marketing as part of its launch campaign:
Bolain views stealth marketing not as a covert campaign, but as "an approach where consumers are allowed to pick and choose what information they find relevant to them." Long before Toyota launched the youth-targeted Scion—first in California in 2003 and then across the rest of the United States earlier this year—Bolain and his team were convinced that the new vehicle wouldn’t gain traction without the use of guerilla tactics. So Toyota kicked off a series of dance parties, forehead ads and a docudrama to generate some Scion buzz. The Scion team also placed cars where their audiences congregate, including shopping malls, to facilitate spontaneous test drives.
As important as the tactics themselves was the fact that they were integrated into a broader campaign along with more traditional advertising. "We always said Scion would be layered, not just mass media, not just guerilla, but a combination of the two," he says. Toyota’s brand of stealth seems to be working: The automaker expects to surpass its 2004 sales targets for the Scion by 20 percent to 25 percent.
Others agree that stealth marketing is most effective when it’s used to support, not replace, multifaceted marketing campaigns. Fathom Communications hasn’t been involved in any covert campaigns since it oversaw Sony Ericsson’s camera phone launch. Not because it disapproves of the approach, but because it hasn’t been appropriate for the agency’s other clients.
And we couldn't have summed it up better ourselves. (Emphahsis ours)
"Stealth marketing is not the wave of the future," insists Peter Groome, Fathom’s president. "Staying ahead of trends, finding ways to intersect with people without invading privacy or generally turning people off—that is the future. And also the past and present."
Link: CorpWatch: US: Marketing Under the Radar.
