READING PASSAGE
Buzz marketing is a type of advertising used to generate a high level of interest in a product. It gets people to spread the word about a product just by talking about it. The goal is to encourage regular people to generate excitement or “buzz” about a product and spread that positive word of mouth throughout their social networks.
A main advantage of buzz marketing is that the message spreads quickly and easily. A marketing team just has to design the message they want to send and get that message out to the public. A well-crafted buzz marketing campaign will then take on a life of its own. Members of the target audience will discuss the product and generate excitement among their families, friends, and acquaintances.
A second advantage of buzz marketing is that people trust information gained through buzz marketing more than through traditional marketing. This is because buzz marketing is seen simply as sharing information between friends; therefore, it is far more comfortable and believable than other marketing methods. With buzz marketing, people learn about products from someone they trust. As a result, that information is taken very seriously.
Finally, buzz marketing is an inexpensive way to make any traditional marketing campaign more effective. Companies that have added a buzz marketing component to their traditional marketing strategy have reached more consumers at a lower cost than those that rely on traditional marketing alone.
LECTURE TRANSCRIPT
Now, we've been talking about marketing. Today, I want to discuss one popular marketing strategy called buzz marketing. Many of the so-called advantages of buzz marketing are also its disadvantages.
First of all, buzz marketing is fast and easy, which means it spreads negative information quickly and easily, too. If you want to get people interested in your product, so they buy it, you might choose to use buzz marketing, right? People learn about it quickly and tell all their friends. Great, right? Not always. Unless you have good testing and know that your product can live up to its claims, you should be cautious about buzz marketing. Bad information flows just as quickly and easily as good information. If there is a problem with your product and you have relied on social networks to generate positive buzz, well, um, you'll have to deal with the negative buzz that results when people find out about that problem. That can hurt your company's reputation.
Second, if you have bad buzz, people will take it more seriously if they hear it from their friends. And that is harder to counter with additional marketing. Buzz marketing gains its credibility from word of mouth. One person tells another person, and since they know each other they trust the information. This works fine if you have a product that lives up to its claims. But if your product has flaws, the buzz can turn negative and that can damage your company's image for a long time. When people hear bad news about a product from a competitor, they might ignore it. When they hear it from a friend or acquaintance, they take that news more seriously.
Third, buzz marketing can end up being a lot more expensive than traditional marketing, especially if you start to generate bad buzz. Just think of this: a company starts a buzz campaign, and their product starts getting bad buzz. How does a company fix this? Well honestly, they have to start a new advertising campaign just to counter the bad buzz. And this means a lot more money. So, if this happens, it would have been cheaper to just go with traditional advertising in the first place.
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A SAMPLE ESSAY
Both the reading and the lecture talk about buzz marketing. Whereas the reading discusses three advantages of buzz marking, the lecture argues that these so-called advantages are also the problems with buzz marketing.
First, the reading says that buzz marketing can get information about a product out quickly and easily by using social networks. This is fine, the professor points out, if it is good information, but buzz marketing also spreads bad information quickly and easily.
Second, according to the reading, when people learn information from their friends, like with buzz marketing, they trust it more. However, as the professor points out, if you get bad buzz due to problems with a product, it is hard to change that. Buzz marketing can ruin your reputation,
Finally, the reading says buzz marketing is an inexpensive way to make a regular advertising campaign better. The professor disagrees. He says that if you have a bad buzz campaign, you will end up spending more money to fix all of the problems that the bad buzz started.
In conclusion, the reading points to three advantages of buzz marketing —speed, trust, and effectiveness. The professor finds flaws with each of these, thus challenging the advantages of buzz marketing.
