Spontaneous Marketing For The Spontaneous Generation

      In today's competitive business environment, it has come to a point where anything less than aggressive marketing is unproductive and worthless. Marketers should be opportunistic and should grab every bone thrown at them. Instant reaction to consumer behavior has become an integral part of marketing. We, being online marketers, employ the same techniques ourselves but certain catchy ones do grab our attention or even manage to impress us every once in a while. So much so that we've decided to spend some of our valuable time to write about real time marketing and its effects.

     Even though this class of marketing has been in existence for a few decades, it never really took off until the internet and the social media started to spread among the general public . There have been some stunts that have received widespread attention from people all around the globe.

      Oreo's real time marketing stunt during the Superbowl received much attention owing to its timing, selection of target audience, level of simplicity and most importantly the medium used. Months of planning and preparation had indeed gone into the seemingly simple tweet that was highly rewarded for being the epitome of opportunistic marketing technique. As with all risky marketing techniques, real time marketing has had its share of failures or "epic fails" in internet lingo. One such example is the recent marketing effort from Gogo, an in-flight internet service provider. While the Justine Sacco controversial tweet issue was at its peak of media attention, Gogo tweeted the following.

    

         A general analysis of the tweet immediately reveals what went wrong here. First off, the issue taken up was highly volatile and involved racial sentiments. Secondly, they decided to market their product at the expense of someone's misfortune which came up to be extremely selfish from their part. But when something pulls you down you should get right back up. That is exactly what Gogo did by owning up to their mistakes and tweeting an apology to all those who found the tweet selfish. The ability to quickly recover from a hard blow comes as an integral part of real time marketing, especially because of its spontaneous nature that overrules the idea of an in-depth analysis of the action to be taken.

     "People on the internet are exposed to all kinds of things, so in theory they would have a higher threshold to offense". This statement would have been correct if the Internet was indeed an entity, but people fail to realize that it is composed of individuals who have varying levels of tolerance and that all it takes is a spark to light a wildfire. Anonymity is another factor that adds to the  unpredictable nature of the internet, proving it to be the only place in the world where you can say anything and get away with it.

     When it's all said and done you still need to take a few risks if you want to reach the top, ask anyone at the top of their respective industry, like us. See what we did there? Yes, real time marketing to all those who just read our blog.