Contagious Insight /
Weaponise your audience / We’ve seen many brands use marketing to weaponise their audience, offering them incentives to promote products and services to their own friends and families. We wrote a trend article on this marketing tactic in 2015. More recently we wrote about a startup called Storr that people can use to set up their own online store, fill it with a curated selection of products from Storr’s partners, and then earn commission on sales.
Diesel’s new ecommerce initiative promotes customer loyalty by using a similar mechanic to Storr. It also leverages the effectiveness of personal recommendations as a means of persuasion. According to a 2015 report from data analytics company Nielsen, 83% of people say they completely or somewhat trust recommendations from friends – more than any other form of marketing.
However, it is far from certain that recommendations from friends will carry the same weight when they come as a result of a brand’s formal incentive scheme.
Still, Diesel’s SIDE:BIZ encourages customers to connect to and invest their time in the brand in return for modest rewards.
