I’ve been reading about peer-to-peer marketing strategies. Although I’ve struggled to find a definition, I think that peer-to-peer marketing is about capitalising on your audience’s willingness (or rather, a segment of your audience) to market your product on your behalf. 

Methods for influencing people’s decisions have changed radically. If we can provide the tools (largely web-based) that help our audiences organise and socialise, they will influence the decisions of others, ultimately helping to build audiences at events. 

Strategies might include posting reviews or testimonials or pictures on your website from people attending your events, allowing visitors to email events information from your website to friends, through to creating quirky ‘viral advertising’ that gets posted on YouTube or other content-sharing sites or passed from one person to another via email. 

The reason for my interest in peer-to-peer is because we know that the social context is incredibly important to understanding the reasons why people go to cultural experiences. Alan Brown (who incidentally speaks in Wellington tomorrow - I’ll blog about this later in the week) says in his useful article Initiators & Responders:

A mounting body of research suggests that who invites you to a concert has as much to do with your decision as other factors such as the program, guest artists, etc. … Word of mouth remains a powerful source of information for cultural consumers because many people are starved for unbiased information about cultural activities.

For many, social interaction is a pretext for attending an event. Alan calls these people - sitting at home, waiting for an invite from friend or family - the ’responders’. Those who organise outings and cultural experiences for others - and who may gain considerable satisfaction from doing so - are the ‘initiators’.

Alan argues that precious marketing dollars would be best spent finding new ways to market to responders indirectly through their initiator friends, and he’s got some concrete suggestions for how to do this in his article. Although surveys show that initiators are a much smaller group than responders, because of their influencing role, they may be responsible for many more ticket sales (Alan does the math).

Alan outlines a new model for ‘customer-centred marketing relationships’ and argues persuasively for changing aspects of the design of our cultural experiences, too, ‘with the goal of offering consumers a menu of involvement opportunities that fit into their lifestyles and reinforce their self-perceptions’. If social context is critical to audience particpation, we can’t ignore Alan’s suggestions for restructuring our programmes and using peer-to-peer marketing strategies to build audiences.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Marketing, Social media, Technology, Your stories, Building audiences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.