All I want to do is have some fun
Thanks to my friend David Sargeant from Zukido, I am now obsessed with having fun. No not that kind of fun. The clean, safe fun from German car manufacturers, Volkswagen. They are touting the word around the internet for a new campaign in a very serious and almost not fun fashion. Apparently, there is a theory behind the thing we find fun.
Fun as a theory? Hmmm… Sounds complicated, perhaps full of scientific ponderings and results found in studies by academics that really should have better things to do – not much fun at all. But actually, the guys at Volkswagen have a point. There should be more theory behind having fun. Not in the ‘it’s New Year’s Eve so let’s have organised fun that ends up not being fun’ kind of way, but in the simplicity put forward by Volkswagen that making things fun makes people do more of it – it changes our behaviour. Is life really that simple? According to their site, http://thefuntheory.com/, people deposited more bottles in the bottle bank, dropped more litter in the bin and walked up stairs rather than used the escalator when the activity in question was made more fun. Really, is life that simple?
The Fun Theory is, of course, not Volkswagen’s main product but a vehicle for promoting their corporate responsibility ethos. Whilst, it is fun to watch (especially the piano stairs that I definitely would like at home), Volkswagen has also turned the site into a competition to find similarly fun incentive based schemes from the public (for no other reason it seems than because they can, which is usually the best reason actually). And that’s where the fun part, for a marketer is, they are tapping into the public’s imagination to stimulate a brand engagement that could otherwise not have been stimulated. Though, I hope the site’s five entries aren’t the only ones, my favourite being the “balanced stairway” straight out of Wile E. Coyote’s handbook of invention: “The idea consists in using gravity to make an escalator without using electrical energy. It can be used in a place where people want to go up and down, like the entrance of a subway. We concentrate people that want to go down in a platform, then the people that want to go up stay in another platform .” Erm… what? And the accompanying diagram doesn’t help detailing “some kind of pulley” and “ropes”. Yep, I’ll have whatever they’re on.
But I digress. Some gambling sites try to achieve brand engagement with winner competitions into poker tournaments or bingo cruises. However, these mainly focus on existing customers (not a bad thing), and usually are gambling related (not a bad thing either). But what I am talking about here is a brand engagement that goes beyond this. It is aligning your brand with an ethos, theme or product quite unrelated to your original business. Then promoting that new mouthpiece or marketing channel as a way of engaging your brand values with your existing or new public. This method understands that conversion rates will be low, but it is a high-level lofty branding exercise rather than straightforward acquisition.
Calvin, back a few years ago, was a master at this with Bodog TV, Bodog Fight and Bodog Music and its Battle of the Bands. Many in the industry derided these as vanity exercises and simply missed the point. Nowadays, companies relish in the opportunity to spend valuable dollars on such activities: Volkswagen with its “The Fun Theory”, T-Mobile’s flash mob featuring P!nk in Trafalgar Square (http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/sing/) , LG’s Best Day Ever campaign (link) and more that are vaguely related or not related at all to the original brand.
The point behind these is the creativity, the buzz and now with the internet so prevalent in our lives, the ability to create an exponential viral campaign. It would be great to switch on a mainstream television programme to see a gambling company’s marketing campaign being talked about as passionately as I saw Volkswagen’s Fun Theory being talked about today on television.
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