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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Rumours a double edged sword!


Its seen that rumours is an effective way to create a buzz. In fact talking about rumours, i still remember when the Blasts took place in Bangalore, rumours of the a blast in a locality called shivajinagar with a death toll of 50 was all around the place. Whereas actually there was no blast anywhere close to shivajinagar. As expected this rumour had spread all around Bangalore in less than an hour after the blasts.

Any rumour is subjected to “flattening”, “sharpening” and “assimilation”, just to make the rumour a little more sticky. Where flattening is removing the parts of the story we feel is unnecessary, then sharpening is where we enhance the remaining part of the story and finally we assimilate to see if the story fits our shared mental framework.

Rumours though can be seen as a double edged sword. Looking at the positive side of rumour in a buzz campaign, the best example would be that of Apple. While listening to one recent episodes of 'This Week in Technology' i came across the fact that Apple has a 3-Tiered Marketing Model. Where Apple's policy of maintaining its secrecy with products has resulted in several rumour sites starting a buzz around the product long before its release. The other two tiers are mainstream media advertising followed by enthusiast sites.

On the flip side rumours can also spell the downfall of a buzz. If there are negative rumours against your brand it can have a bad effect on your brand equity. Consider a brand like say Nike, now any rumour about Nike would easily spread as most of us already assimilate with the brand Nike. Another example here would be that of 'Colas being very harmful for health', and the rumour that a woman supposedly used coke instead of acid to clean her bathroom and it had the same effect. Now this rumour spread like fire and had a big impact on sales of colas in India, and a few states like Kerala in India had even banned Colas for a brief period.

Hence think twice before you choose to go the rumour way in buzzing!!!

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