Brands like people to have good experiences in association with them. Coke, for example, want to be there when you’re having fun with your friends at the beach. Meat and Livestock Australia want you to come home to a beef casserole after you’ve been playing in the rain with your friends in winter (kudos to MLA and BMF for a great campaign). Marketing departments think that if they can plant their brand into your wonderful memories, they’ll be remembered fondly by association. It works. But there’s also a flip side. If your brand is there when people aren’t having fun, you’re a little bit screwed. Cheap bourbon is reponsible for more ‘first hangovers’ among teenage girls than any other alcoholic beverage in the world (I have no statistical evidence to back that up, but I’ve asked around), which, I dare say, is one of the reasons Jim Beam doesn’t even bother trying to market its product to women.

Imagine then, if your product was scientifically proven to kill and associated by most of the population with death. Don’t get me wrong, this can be a huge advantage, if you are, say, Lockheed Martin, but not so good if you are the maker of a consumer product. Cigarettes will, in fact, kill you. Phillip Morris makes more of them than just about anyone else.

I wouldn’t work in Marketing for Phillip Morris if they paid me $1,000,000 a year, but plenty of people would. For that reason they have some of the most highly-paid marketing executives in the world and they aren’t short on talent. Their brands are associated with death and sickness, but they can’t spin this with advertising, they can’t sponsor anything, they are forced by legislation to put graphic images of the diseases they cause on their products, they won’t show their products in films, people can’t even use them in public and they are taxed heavily by governments. Devising marketing strategies for Phillip Morris would have to be up their on the difficult scale with being the New York PR rep for Al Qaeda.

Virtually the only marketing avenue left to Phillip Morris is online. Even on the vast open plains of the wild world web they’re still doing it tough. Google any cigarette brand and see if you can find an official website with traditional marketing material. You can’t. Check out what they have to do instead. Despite being inside a maximum security marketing prison, somehow, somewhere, sometimes, people still smoke. Millions of them. Despite the best efforts of government health departments to get people to stop, smoking rates in the USA have decreased by a measly 2% a year for the last decade. Pear consumption in Italy could have decreased by that amount an no-one would have noticed.

The best marketing strategy in the world is to make a product that people with elevated social status think is cool. If the cool people have it, everyone else will want it. The second best marketing strategy in the world is to make your product addictive.

Imagine you work in the marketing department of a noodle company. Your corporation provides “quick, easy and healthy meal solutions with broad consumer appeal” (even Don Watson would be proud of that corporate philosophy). Your job is to sell more noodles. You’ve made a name for yourself flogging rice crackers to the female snacking demographic and word from management is the ‘poor male uni student demographic’ is untapped. Your research tells you that they like MTV and they respond to online, so there’s no possible chance you’re going to be able to launch a campaign unless there’s some sort of social media marketing component. You and management don’t really understand how the whole social networking thing works, but you know it’s cool and everyone else is doing it (not to mention the competition), so you do some research and decide to give it a shot.

After months and months of collaboration with the big-name advertising agency, some sizeable cheques, a few prayers, plenty of late-night meal solutions, and some rapturous applause, you come up with Pimp My Kettle. Everyone tells you it’s a great idea, people can watch episodes of a pretend TV show based on the MTV hit and then they can join the site and create a profile to get information about how they can participate in a charity auction to buy kettles pimped by celebrities, all the while being exposed to your brand. You can even get the dude from Mythbusters to do the voiceover; how could the demographic possibly NOT identify and respond! You love it, the agency is proud of it, the boss is happy. It looks great and people are saying the art direction is brilliant. The launch party is a hit and gee-whiz, those pimped out kettles look great in the foyer of company HQ, almost like, gasp, trophies, in a cabinet. The agency is even talking about entering it at Cannes for a Cyber Lion!

The launch date comes, the tech guys do their thing and Pimp My Kettle goes live. You sit back and wait for the sales figures to start going through the roof and update your LinkedIn profile (you learnt about that one in the social networking crash-course the agency gave you) to make sure it’s easy for the headhunters from Nestle to come knocking, but not so easy that management from your company knows what you’re up to.

Two weeks go by, nothing… A few friends of the creative team at the agency and a couple of your cousins have joined up to the site, but it’s been a bit quieter than you thought it would be. No matter, Google alerts (another thing you picked up from an online marketing blog) are telling you that people are starting to talk about your campaign, it’ll all be good, surely. Just a bit of lag time until it all kicks in.

A couple more weeks go by and critics start pointing out that the whole idea was ripped-off a YouTube rip-off of a rip-off. Out there in the blogosphere the demographic is yawning; people are saying that the whole ‘pimp-my’ thing has like, so been done before. Orders from Woolies and Coles are up, but word from sales is that product isn’t exactly flying off the shelves and word at the pub is that the guys over at Maggi are about to launch a TV campaign with a bunch of Olympic stars who claim that their noodles are the key to their success in Beijing; you hate those fuckers ’cause they have enough cash to pull stunts like that all year, but you only had enough budget to run Pimp My Kettle in prime-time for two months.

But that’s the brilliant thing see, even though your brand can’t afford the TV spend throughout the whole year, the website is going to keep working for you for at least the next 12 months, that’s the POWER of social media. In fact, you don’t even NEED TV because the Gen Y doesn’t even watch TV anymore anyway (that Forrester Research survey confirmed it).

Jeez, imagine if it really took off and became a fad, like the ‘Will it Blend‘ stuff. It could SO happen! The focus groups loved the content, it even made your mum laugh and she doesn’t laugh at anything, imagine if you started a whole new trend in kettle-pimping, it could take off around the world and imagine what that would do for the brand! The reach would be phenomenal and everyone would know it was your baby.

OK, LOL, so that probably won’t happen, but man, you’re using social media in a real proper tie-in campaign, you should be super-proud. In fact, you probably should put that on your resume; ‘implemented social media marketing campaign to boost product sales by X%’. No wait, better make it ‘XX%’! Screw that, make it ‘XXX%’ you can fill in the exact figures later, when you find out what they are. They’ll be three figures for sure - that’s the power of social media! There’s just no way this could possibly go wrong.