Scene 1: You are standing at the Statue of Liberty, a guy comes to you, and asks whether you can snap his picture with the big stone monument. You grant the guy this favor, the guy hands you his digital camera, goes away and poses with the statue, you click the picture. You see the picture on the small LCD screen and admire the quality of the picture. The guy then comes to you and shows you the different modes in the camera and asks you to click a picture in the Sepia mode. You are now curious;, you now start asking the guy what different modes are available, what is the price of the camera and other features of the camera. What happened just now was that you just experienced marketing in the stealth mode. You were unaware of the fact that the guy was one of the 60 actors who were deployed to 10 US cities by Sony Ericsson to market their cameras.

Scene 2: After a week of grueling work hours you enter a bar on a Friday night. You see a beautiful girl sitting at the corner table, all alone. You gather all the confidence you can and approach her with the tried and tested pick-up line “Can I buy you a drink?” and the next moments you end up chatting, bonding with the girl. After 1-2 hours (or even shorter) you realize that, now is the appropriate time to make the move.  You ask the girl for her number, and await the answer to this moment of truth. She gleefully takes out her cell phone and gives it to you to punch in your number. You punch in the number and now you start commending the phone. Nevertheless the praise might be biased due to the situation, the girl tells you about every feature of the phone. 26 year old actor Julia Royter, was hired by Blackberry to market their product; Blackberry Pearl, in stealth mode.

The aim of stealth marketing is not to trick you but to appeal to your sub-conscious. Unlike a door-to-door salesman, the person does not keep on insisting that you buy a product or see a demonstration. Instead of forcing the customer to see a demonstration, you make the customer curious enough that they seek your product.

Pros

1. Better customer targeting: People who are interested in your product will only seek your more information about it.
2. No Force-feeding: Force feeding information always has a negative impact on the brand. This on the other hand employs customers who seek the information.
3. Let-it-flow: Turning one customer a fan of your product means you passed on the message to all his connections, his peers, relatives, co-workers etc. (Buzz/ Word-of-mouth marketing)
4. Better Reach: This method forms a better connect with the consumer compared to other forms of marketing communication.
5. Less expensive

Cons

1. Lesser Reach: Compared to other modes of marketing communication. This method can impact fewer prospects at a time.
2. High Risk: If a consumer finds out that the person is staging a coup, the consumer might feel tricked and may end up developing a negative perception about the brand.

Stealth marketing has an online mode too. Ever conducted an online research when you buy a laptop or a DSLR or even a mobile phone? You will probably be exposed to numerous forums, where so called experts, suggest you the best laptop or mobile phone within your budget. These experts are paid by company officials to push their products. Blogs citing “Shahrukh drinks Tropicana daily in the morning” is basically appealing to the consumers that their role model uses a brand and consumers tend to copy their lifestyle. Product placements in movies, James Bond’s Aston Martin or Tom cruise’s Mac in Mission Impossible can also be taken as examples of stealth marketing.

Thus, stealth marketing even being an act is a very transparent form of marketing communication. The customer can make a uniform decision after he has experienced the product. This is different from experiential marketing because the behavior of the consumer is different in both methods. In experiential marketing the consumer might suffer from the Hawthorne effect.

Stealth marketing is a bit of risk though. If a customer finds out that everything you are doing is an act, the customer feels tricked and might never buy your product. Thus, a stealth marketing mission must be carried out as a top-secret mission like practiced in the military. This is probably the reason that you can find only 4-5 examples till date for stealth marketing campaigns. The marketing firms have done a lot of work to keep it a secret. So you may never know that the girl you hit at the bar might be a stealth marketer from Diageo or the guy playing a console in Starbucks, be a man-on-top-secret-mission from Nintendo.

Sources

http://articles.nydailynews.com/2010-04-19/entertainment/27062069_1_stealth-marketing-buzz-marketing-blackberry-pearlhttp://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/23/60minutes/main579657.shtml.

 Do leave your thoughts

Abhishek Kumar is a PGDM (2010) student at IIM Calcutta. He is a tech junkie and always wonders what he is doing in an MBA institute. Marketing has always kept his hopes alive. He has a dream of conquering the world through advertisements. Designing is his passion. Write to him at abhishekk2012@email.iimcal.ac.in

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