Congregate-Flash-Disperse: Flash Mob Marketing

Hey Gorillas,

When it comes to guerrilla marketing, Flash Mob Marketing may just be one of the most budget-friendly, high-impact tactic to alert your consumers to the existence of your business.

A business goes through five steps in their marketing strategy starting at the introduction and hopefully ending at the loyal client. The marketing funnel presented below shows the stages of the relationship between a marketer and a consumer.
1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Preference
4. Action
5. Loyalty

Flash Mob marketing is used mostly for the first stage, the Awareness stage. Simply put, Awareness is introducing your brand to your market. The biggest challenge in this stage is standing out from all the other brands trying to steal your audience's attention.

This challenge has led to some of the most creative, bizarre and ingenious marketing campaigns we have today. It has also resulted in the jaded consumer who, frankly, is sick and tired of being sold to. It's a catch 22 relationship: Consumer is bombarded with marketing messages -they tune out - marketer finds new ways to create awareness - consumer is interested for a second - is overexposed - feels bombarded - marketer goes back to the drawing board to cook up new ways to create awareness....

With the rising prices and declining effectiveness of traditional marketing, the popularity of non-traditional marketing, including guerrilla tactics such as Flash Mob marketing, has steadily risen.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Flash Mob is defined as "an unusual and pointless act".  Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary provides a kinder definition. " A flash mob is a group of people who organize on the Internet and then quickly assemble in a public place, do something bizarre, and disperse”.

Although Flash Mobs have a history dating back to the 1800s, the modern genesis of the flash mob was in 2003 when Bill Wasik, Senior Editor at Harper's Magazine, organized a flash mob at the Macy's department store in New York City. Wasik directed a mob of over 100 people to the Rug department of Macy's where they gathered around and stared at an expensive rug, naturally peaking the curiosity of shoppers.

Since then, the flash mob phenomenon has grown exponentially with marketers using the shock-and-awe nature of this tactic to create awareness about a brand. Without a doubt, flash mobs are cool, entertaining and incongruous enough to make us go "what just happened?"

The question remains, are they effective as a marketing tool?
We'll answer that question next week. In the meantime, here are some examples of flash mobs.
We would love to hear your thoughts on these.

Frozen Grand Central by ImprovEverywhere






Christmas Flash Mob






 Until next time, think incongruous. Nothing like an element of surprise to give your customers a wake-up boost.

KBG~
www.keyboardgorilla.com