Posts Tagged ‘cell phone’

Marketing puffery never pays

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

Seems we’ve been up to our eyeballs in positioning and message strategy work at Outsource Marketing lately. Of course, positioning should be the cornerstone of all your marketing communications—without meaningful differentiation, you’ve got nothin’, after all.

But your positioning has to be more than simply unique and matter to your prospects. It has to be true, too.

With that in mind, watch this:

View on YouTube

If you are selling “the world’s toughest phone” that’s “virtually unbreakable,” perhaps it should be.

While Sonim XP1 CEO Bob Plaschke handled this with an amazing amount of grace, the fact is it would appear to some that this is nothing more than another hollow marketing claim.

Persuasion, good.
Puffery, bad.

Not just because you might get caught. It’s because it doesn’t respect the people that ultimately pay the bills—your customers.

Is Sonim guilty of the age-old marketer’s practice of marketing puffery? Considering their “unbreakable” phone broke, does it really matter?

What do you think?

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History’s worst viral campaign, or best?

Friday, June 13th, 2008

Above are two of four videos that were uploaded to YouTube two weeks ago proving that the radiation from cell phones is strong enough to actually pop corn.

Or not.

As it turns out, it’s a hoax—a viral marketing ploy by Cardo Systems, a maker of cell phone earpieces and headsets.

They’ve gained worldwide attention and have gone from a relative unknown to a poster child for viral campaigns.

Response has been mixed. Some are saying its brilliant and you can’t argue with it’s success. Others say it’s the Internet at its worst—it preys upon our collective fears in order to sell a product.

Even the Gawker Media Gossip Blog had this to say:

It would be satisfying to see this uncovered as history’s worst viral campaign.

Whether the makers of these videos realized it or not, by ‘proving’ an urban legend, these videos were Made to Stick.

What do you think, is this campaign responsible or not?

Comment below to weigh in.