Faceless Marketing

No, it’s not an alien inva­sion:

With the blank­est of blank expres­sions on their faces, these mys­te­ri­ous fig­ures have been pop­ping up in the most unlikely of places.

The face­less mutants have a pen­chant for A-list celebrity bashes and have been spot­ted at Elton John’s White tie ball and Har­rods sum­mer sale, opened by Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall.

With a mem­brane of skin stretched tightly over their eyes, noses and mouths, the alien-like fig­ures were most recently snapped ‘watch­ing’ a match perched on Mur­ray Mount at Wimbledon.

As an astute observer just pointed out in this thread, these peo­ple are yet another exam­ple of viral mar­ket­ing — this time, for Lotus Cars. Really, I’m increas­ingly skep­ti­cal that this type of mar­ket­ing works. If any­thing, it makes me not want to pur­chase these auto­mo­biles. (Steve Huff doesn’t like it either.)

I’m sure the Daily Mail got a nice adver­tis­ing check for pub­lish­ing this non-news story.

Follow-up: Brett Dun­can takes issue with my skep­ti­cisim of the mar­ket­ing strategy’s effectiveness:

It’s dan­ger­ous and inac­cu­rate to mea­sure suc­cess of a viral cam­paign in terms of sales. Granted, all mar­ket­ing must ulti­mately lead to sales, but not all mar­ket­ing tac­tics have to lead to sales directly. Viral mar­ket­ing must be mea­sured in pub­lic­ity, buzz and expo­sure. This expo­sure, in turn, should then lead to inter­est, which should then fun­nel down into sales. It’s not an all or noth­ing propo­si­tion; it’s a step-by-step process in which viral mar­ket­ing is sim­ply a piece of the puzzle.

Based on pub­lic­ity, I’d have to say the face­less peo­ple cam­paign is work­ing brilliantly.

Of course, Dun­can is cor­rect. Mar­ket­ing is a com­plex oper­a­tion. Still, every­thing is about rev­enue in the end. I would not care if a mar­ket­ing strat­egy leads to thou­sands of news­pa­per arti­cles on my prod­uct; a front-page, search-result rank­ing on Google; and a pos­i­tive brand aware­ness through­out the world if rev­enue did not increase as a result. (If rev­enue remained level, then I would have actu­ally lost money after endur­ing addi­tional costs for the mar­ket­ing operation.)

I’m still not con­vinced that this viral mar­ket­ing effort will suc­ceed. But if Dun­can or any­one will point me to a future profit-and-loss state­ment show­ing an increase in sales rev­enue between the cur­rent quar­ter and the next, I’d be happy to admit that I was wrong.