Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
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 www.ideavirus.com
Bumper Sticker Marketing
Years ago, I was a walking parody of a high-tech yuppie.
I worked as a poorly compensated marketer at a start-up software company in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. I drove a dented old Saab. I used a Macintosh. And on the back of my Saab I
proudly affixed a bumper sticker that read, “I’d rather be driving a Macintosh.”
This is an ancient form of ideavirus marketing, of course. I used my car as an amplifier,
exposing my message to hundreds or thousands of people. But even better, given the
neighborhood I was driving in, I was focusing the message on an appropriate hive, and given
the car I was driving, adding power to my sneezing.
Think about it. If the bumper sticker had been on the back of a junker Chevy, rusting
outside an abandoned farm in Oklahoma, you would have had a very different response to
the message, no?
The neatest thing about this technique is the way Apple converted the private (what sort of
computer do I use) to the public (my proclamation of how happy I was to be a Mac user).
There are countless opportunities for marketers to do precisely the same thing today. And
not just on your bumper. Some marketers ride along with their product—the Ralph Lauren
pony, for example, is advertising on the front of your shirt all day long. Others manage to
make it a more political choice—Marlboro, for example, was one of the ten largest marketers
of imprinted clothing a few years ago.
Picking the medium for your “bumper sticker” is important, but it’s just as important to
determine 
why
someone is going to be willing to stick his neck out to promote 
your 
product.
Personal pride is an excellent tactic! If people are willing to sneeze on your behalf because
they’re proud of you, your product and their association with it, you’re in. Now all you’ve
got to do is give them a smooth way to spread the word.

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