Buzz Marketing

Of the many marketing jargons and fundas, Buzz Marketing has quite proved its metal in time and has still not lost its charms; oh yah! it sounds cool too. It often finds use prior to launch of a product or a refreshingly new product variety or brand. You kinda drop clues here & there that you r working on a virgin project, one never seen or heard of b4 but always hold back the essentials and details. One may even start acting paranoiac, trying to conceal one's venture from prying eyes. But alas! its common knowledge, that such antics stimulate more people from enquiring about it, after all, we are descendants of Adam & Eve.

One such use of Buzz Marketing is highlighted in the release of Napster.

Shawn Fanning loved music & out of the love 4 it, the then 18 yr old Northeastern Uni. freshman brought a panic in the music world in 1999. Bugged by hearing constant complaints from his roommate about the nuisance of downloading Internet music from mymp3.com 7 attracted by a sudden surge of interest in computers, Shawn set his heart to develop a music download software package at the beginning of June 1999.

The tactic then used by Shawn is what is popularly known as Buzz Marketing. A working version of this software was give by him to about thirty people he knew for testing purposes; mostly youngsters he had met through chat rooms. His request to each of them was, " Try this & let me know about any problems or suggestions and please keep it to yourself because I don't want people to know about it yet."

A few days later, the software had been downloaded by 10,000- 15,000 people. The traffic soon increased in leaps & bounds and Napster took birth; the name being akin to Shawn's nappy hairstyle. Despite some sceptics view as to whether people would be willing to share files, by Oct. 1999, Napster had 32 million users and was adding another million Every WeeK!!!

So all it took was to create a little bit of curiosity quotient and a little hush-hush; with no advertisements, no push strategy, Napster had made a mark.