SnapHawk Blog

There’s a quote by Czech author Milan Kundera that I’m fond of.  He states, “Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.”  While this assertion is easier said than done, it’s certainly a powerful idea that can help us understand what it is that generates customers for a business.  To delve a little deeper, let’s look at some examples of companies that truly take this idea to heart.

To start with, innovation is what moves businesses forward.  If you don’t innovate, you’ll get left in the dust.  Google has made a living off coming up with the newest, coolest technology that consistently meets its customers’ needs.  Apple, too, is infamous for coming out with innovative, high-tech products so sleek and user-friendly that some people go fanatic over them.  On the other hand, Blockbuster is a business which is failing because of its inability to innovate.  Once the leading video rental store in the country, Blockbuster failed to adapt to new technology, and as a result, has seriously struggled to compete with newer companies such as Netflix and Redbox.  Now Blockbuster is close to bankruptcy.

Ever since Google began dominating the search engine market, many up-and-coming search engines have come and gone.  But as far as we can remember, none have stormed the market with as much vigor as Microsoft’s Bing has in this past year.  In fact, Bing’s driving force seems largely to compete with Google to be the world’s largest and most popular search engine—a bold move to say the least.

Right from the get-go, Microsoft made clear intentions it wanted to make a huge push in the search engine market when it decided to rebrand its current Live Search.  On June 1, 2009, Microsoft launched Bing, and announced that they would spend between $80 million and $100 million on a marketing campaign for its latest search engine.  So far it seems to have been a fairly successful strategy, as Bing grew its US search engine market share to 13%, putting it in 3rd place just slightly behind Yahoo!.  With the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal already finalized and in transition, Bing will soon power Yahoo! Search making it, at last, a viable competitor with Google.  That would give Bing a 26% market share compared to Google’s 65%, though with Bing’s current pace of growth, a market share of 33% is very possible in the near future.  Bing’s growing market share is especially important to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) professionals, as a competitive market may mean lower prices for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising, leading to a greater number of businesses adding SEM to their advertising model.

If you need an example of how to perfectly integrate social media and viral marketing into your business’s marketing campaign, look no further than Old Spice.  If you haven’t seen the new hilarious Old Spice Body Wash commercials, you should check them out right now.

What’s most impressive about the campaign isn’t how humorous or unique its ads are, but rather how quickly it generated huge viral buzz stemming from Old Spice going out of its way to interact with fans all over the Internet.  On July 14, Isaiah Mustafa, the Old Spice guy himself, replied to comments and questions on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks via personalized YouTube videos.  Within 24 hours there were 181 reply videos posted on YouTube, producing over 6 million views.