Busted!
by Duncan O'Leary
Being a text vote it was fairly predictable that a group with a teenage following would beat Katie Melua for example, but what may have helped Busted beat rivals such as Girls Aloud and McFly was the use of their slightly controversial ‘School Chairman’ innovation to mobilise and widen their fan base. To become a School Chairman all you have to do is promote Busted within your school (it's for pupils, not teachers) and show some evidence of success. Having done this you not only get the prestigious title but also free Busted memorabilia and maybe even a phone-call from one of the band.
This peer-to-peer approach, or ‘buzz marketing’, is becoming increasingly popular according to this article, and seems also to have been part of the thinking behind the book published recently by the Holiday Inn hotel company entitled About the towels – we forgive you: Absorbing tales of borrowed towels. The book contains amusing anecdotes collected together by the company during an ‘amnesty’, when customers were allowed to tell of why they had ‘borrowed’ towels without fear of prosecution. Most of the proceeds of the book will go to charity and the first 1000 people to buy the book will receive a free Holiday Inn Towel in the post.
In conventional marketing terms this clearly helps to generate a friendly glow and some good publicity for the company, but for some people the cleverest thing about it is that it actually legitimizes ‘borrowing’ towels from the hotel. At the price of a few towels, the Holiday Inn company can get their (branded) towels in people’s homes, allowing them to tap in to their social networks and take advantage of the way that we increasingly take our cues from each other – rather than from the adverts that we either ignore or switch off on the TV. All of which simply means that the money for towel replenishment in the future simply needs to come out of the marketing budget, rather than the...err...toweling one.