Tag Archives: utility marketing

Anatomy of An Insight: Fartcode

If you are not even slightly entertained by flatulent humor, there is probably something wrong with your emotional state.

“You don’t have to be smart to laugh at farts, but you have to be stupid not to.”
Louis C.K.

Gas is always a blast for me, so not surprisingly this was highly entertaining:

Insight: Kids are not interested in nutritional value of food. Nutrition in food makes you fart. Fart equals fun. Educate kids through farts about the nutritional value of food. Get smart with your fart.

Nice touch on this app, combining utility and social sharing.

Only question with this brilliance is will it really appeal to kids (kids referring to anyone younger than me)?

The look & feel is actually more resembling an episode of Beavis & Butt-Head from 90´s and the song could have been lifted from the glory days of Epitaph records skate-punk.

Is it something that resonates more with us middle-aged kids than the real target audience?

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#AmazonCart: Innovation in Advertising (not in eCommerce)

I am somewhat skeptical about utility marketing.
Yes, brands should be useful.
But as far as the advertising goes, most of the brands are fighting with the lack of attention. They need to first crack the indifference barrier amongst consumers. For that you have to first entertain and then deliver.
To underline this point, brand apps are generally destined to fail. Over 80% of them struggle to get even 1000 downloads.
That being said this is useful marketing at its finest:

Why this approach rocks?

1. #Amazoncart taps to real behavior
People already use Amazon as a “shopping list” for their future purchases. This just makes it couple of clicks more easier. At its core, this is not really educating new behavior just a minor tweak to existing pattern. I think tapping to the shopping list behavior is the core thing and also something that many of the commentators have not fully grasped. #Amazoncart is not innovation in eCommerce it is an advertising innovation:

2. #Amazoncart is free advertising with every tweet
Besides being rooted to real behavior, every time someone tweets #AmazonCart it will be visible to followers of that person. Making #AmazonCart hashtag famous is one thing, but actually what is the most brilliant part that the amazon product link gets double exposure as you add to Amazon cart by replying. This creates more opportunities for people to see it and go buying in Amazon.
Currently it seems that the amount of #Amazoncart seems already promising (from Hashtags.org):

#Amazoncart

Naturally these are small drops in the ocean for Goliath brand like Amazon but every purchase counts. If Amazon is able to get bursts of over 8k tweets for #AmazonCart in hour constantly it definitely shows great potential for Amazon. Also after the initial development, there is not that much cost for the program (expect for the promoting it).

3. #Amazoncart is super simple
After you have connected your Twitter account to Amazon, you can reply with #AmazonCart to any tweet containing an amazon product link. This puts the item to your shopping cart and you can finish the shopping later. The beauty of this concept is that it keeps it simple enough and does not add too many steps to the progress.

Hopefully in the future we are able reply #AmazonCart to every kind of tweet beyond the Amazon links. Buying products straight from YouTube or Instagram –links anyone?

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