Well, how does it feel when your prospectus for thesis had been rejected for, say, five times in three months?
Sad, yes.
But, I'm gooooing on, finding new topics that will satisfy my professor's standard.
Anyway, I'm developing a topic about selfie. Yes, those with pout poses, LV bags in one hand, and taking self portrait in front of mirror. Using front camera or web cams, people can take their self portraits and edit them as beautiful as possible with various applications. And, the selfie is not a selfie if people don't upload them to social media. You might get bored by this fact, but I will keep tell you that "Selfie" is Oxford's Word of The Year in 2013 and the hashtag with #selfie is keep growing in social media. The popularity of this pop culture grows meaningful effects in quite broad area of study, such as marketing, psychology, consumer behavior, even photography itself.
The phenomenon is fascinating, especially in marketing. Looking at the new wave of movement to do selfie, brands are involving selfie as one of their marketing effort. Calvin Klein using hashtag #mycalvins in Instagram to make their consumer show off their Calvin Klein when in use. Samsung hired Ellen de Generes to take a 37 million retweeted selfie in Oscar as product placement. The recent marketing campaign with selfie concept is Dove's #BeautyIs which shows that selfie can make women feel more beautiful and secure about themselves.
Selfie reminds me of Flashmob, a movement that was a hip in 2011. People walked out of their houses to dance along with a group of strangers in a meeting point. The movement in the dance was uploaded in Youtube and they could learn the dance first before dancing together with others. The videos of people did flashmobs in malls, parties, and public spaces were spread in huge numbers. The most famous Flashmob was made with people in a city where Oprah did her Oprah Winfrey Show. The amount of people joined the flashmob was amazing, they made Oprah cried, too. Soon after, Flashmob was seen as a marketing tool that could build brand awareness of the product. It reminds me of Mizone, a beverage brand in Indonesia, that created a Flashmob movement as part of their campaign and it brought a good effect of awareness and association to the product. Everytime I think of Mizone, I think of the Flashmob, too.
The fast moving of pop culture marketing makes marketers think out of the box and runs faster. It makes a good sense, as internet, especially Web 2.0 is on its way now. People use social media to generate their own content, namely User Generated Content, to share what they are up to. They can post their favorite recipes in Facebook notes, photos of the recent vacation in Instagram, tweet what they feel or think in that second, or just simply take a self portrait a.k.a selfie casually. It is easy to share anything in social media and people are doing it regularly as one of their activity. Social media connects people easily and I admit I cannot live one day without it.
The sharing power that social media has is really effective in pulling people to aware of something. As I've given two examples of guerilla marketing above, they are pretty cheap for companies. As they use social media as the way to market their product, even people are vulnerable to help the brand's marketing activity. Especially for selfie, the consumers of products are posting themselves wearing or using brands for free. The company can release the campaign for free, too. No need to pay the television or newspapers. Post it in social media and BOOM! If it appeals netizens, the brand scores a positive brand awareness. Contrary, if it was a big fail, get ready to find criticism all over the blogs and other social media.
Guerilla marketing, such as selfie, is cheaper than any kind of marketing tools. When it is related to daily products which the brands are competing each other for cost-saving competitive advantage, it can work as a "savior" for the brand. It reduces the marketing cost with a high spread of awareness made through a campaign. For examples of Guerilla Marketing, check this link.
What tickles me is what if selfie marketing be done for luxury brands? Will it devalue the dimensions of luxury brands?
For the rarity --> its shows that quite a lot of people out there own luxury brands. will it still be luxury after?
Will it blew the uniqueness of these brands off? As it correlates in the previous studies that luxury brand users intents about uniqueness of themselves.
Will them?
I will start to write about it tomorrow. Gotta sleep now.
XOXO,
Elizabeth
