Another entry in the saga of “attraction-based marketing”–Mail Order Chickens.
http://www.mailorderchickens.org/
Despite the fact that I’m incredibly busy at work, I couldn’t help but spend 15 minutes looking at this bizarre website. Apparently it has something to do with social causes related to Ghana, IMF, the World Bank, and Christopher Walken.
The site gives you the premise that chickens on some poor woman’s farm in Ghana are being slaughtered due to the financial pressures created by the PLO and so you need to adopt them. You can look through profiles of chickens and find out more about them by looking at video clips of out-of-work British actors and stand-up comedians.
Once you watch the video clip you can click on a link to adopt a chicken. I highly recommend you go through this process because there’s an interesting little ditty with a barking lady in it.
If I may make a recommendation, I would say take a gander at Bertie’s profile.
So again, the reason I call this “attraction-marketing” is because the form of distribution is not TV, nor radio, nor printed publications, nor Internet advertising drawing you into the site. The site is simply created and then passed around on blogs (like this one) or by email, chat, etc. All funds necessary for the campaign can be put into the quality of the marketing piece itself (in this case, the marketing piece itself is quite an expensive bit of work) rather than distribution costs.
Because you choose to find the marketing rather than having it forced upon you I call it attraction-marketing. Somebody else out there probably has a better name for it. I was going to call it “suck-you-in marketing” but it just didn’t seem to be right.
I think you’ll find it already has a name. VIRAL MARKETING.
I suppose this is a form of viral marketing if you read many of the definitions (see http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-49,GGLD:en&q=define%3A+viral+marketing).
But I think it’s a specific subset of viral marketing. When I think of viral marketing in general, I think of a form of advertising that is passed along as a product is used, as in the case of Yahoo! or MSN email, in which the recipient is exposed to a marketing message every time they receive an email from someone using those services. The marketing message is being passed along unwittingly the way someone might pass along a real virus, or if not unwittingly then not purposefully.
In the case of http://www.mailorderchickens.org, this site would only be analagous to a virus if a virus were the type of thing people passed to one another on purpose. Not to say that the term “viral marketing” can only apply to forms of marketing that behave exactly like a virus, but you see what I mean. Or at least you see that I’m trying to not look stupid.