Snapchat’s Viral Marketing Campaign
Recently, Snap Inc. launched a new hardware, Spectacles, which are sunglasses that can record videos up to 10 seconds at a time from the wear’s perspective, and upload to Snapchat memories. The intuition behind these sunglasses is that users do not have to pull out their phones to take a snap, thus can free their hands to do interesting things without the fear of dropping their phone while Snapping. Snap Inc. is releasing these Spectacles in an unusual manner. The advertisement began by around 60 street side billboards in various cities, but these never included branding for the app. Their goal was to make Snapchat users feel like insiders. Then, once they start releasing the Spectacles, they are only sold in special vending machines called Snapbots that would be dropped at a location adorned with big, yellow ballons. The new location of the Snapbot would only be announced 24 hours before the actual appearance, giving the Snapbot a mysterious and exciting feeling. The Snapbot will be “sleeping” at first, but once you approach it, it will “wake up” and interact with you, making you more likely to actually interact with it and make a purchase.
These marketing strategies are known as “Viral Marketing”, and the purpose is to increase the product usage at the initial stage of the product release. This ties in with the class material because this kind of marketing strategy serves, in my opinion, two purposes. One is to increase the initial population using the product above the critical point, so that people will be more likely to buy the product if a significant amount of people are using it. The other purpose is to selectively choose a group of people that would have more influence in the network, so that these people would be able to persuade more people to use the product. This is because an initial set of people to start a network-level cascade that can eventually lead to the spread of the product globally. Snap Inc.’s new promotion campaign seems very promising from a network perspective, and it will be very interesting to see whether the product would be able to gain popularity among us.
Sources:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/snapbot-snapchat-spectacles/