Mobile Phones are a personalized device and now have become the popular tool for advertising and campaigning. In Europe and US, where rapid proliferation sounds exciting for marketers, Japan, Land of rising Sun is a step ahead. According to a report, Japan leads their western counterpart in mobile Internet, mobile email, mobile gaming, mobile television and mobile banking. With a population of 127million, 100 million are internet subscribers and the statistics clearly reveals that that brands operating in Japan are using the mobile channel more intensively, especially considering Japan is the number one consumer of brand named goods.
Hakuhodo, Japan’s second largest advertising agency have created a laudable mobile marketing campaign called ‘World’s Worst War’ for food brand Tohato . This campaign won award for best mobile marketing campaign in 2008, at the annual D&AD awards. Lets take a closer look at what this campaign entails:

Tohato introduced two very spicy snacks, the one called ‘Burning Hell Hot’ and the other, his archenemy, ‘Bazooka Deadly Hot’. The two flavours were represented as masters of an army that could be joined by buying one of the two flavours in the supermarket. Using the QR-codes 2D barcodes – on the packaging, the consumer could join the army of his master in a massive online multiplayer game. Every night at 4 a.m. a new battle between the two armies would start at one of the 31 different online battlefields, indicated with names like ‘Sweet Suckers Execution Hall’ or ‘Ouch, The City of Anal Torture’. By either training or recruiting friends to signup, players could get promoted and have a better chance of winning. So called ‘War Reporters’ send SMS messages to players, keeping them up-to-date with what’s happening in the battlefield. Meanwhile, fanatic players met up on social networks to discuss their strategies, because the evil army that managed to conquer all the battlefields would win the war.

Eight success factors:

Key Pousttchi and Dietmar G. Wiedemann have identified eight key success factors in their paper on mobile viral marketing. The eight elements they’ve identified are: (1) perceived usefulness by recipient; (2) reward for communicator; (3) perceived ease of use; (4) free mobile viral content; (5) initial contacts; (6) critical mass; (7) first mover advantage; and (8) scalability.

Lets discuss each and every factor in relation to the Tohato campaign:

* The campaign should contain value that is perceived useful by the recipient (1). Providing product or service information is a common way to provide this kind of value, but in the case of Tohato the perceived usefulness can be found in entertainment value.

* Users should be encouraged to communicate the campaign to others (2). Tohato rewards people to spread the word by a using a pyramid system. Users gain power when a friend signs up for their army, and in turn keeps on being promoted when friends of friends sign up. This system meant that involvement in the evil armies spread very rapidly across Japan, according to a report.

* It should be as easy as possible to interact with the campaign (3). Any hurdles should get straightened out and the user experience shouldn’t leave any room for required thinking, as usability expert Steve Krug argues.

* Pousttchi and Wiedemann argue that content should be provided for free (4). Users are used to free content from the Internet since content can be copied. Instead, charge them for things that can’t be copied, says senior maverick at Wired magazine Kevin Kelly. (Kelly 2008) Tohato doesn’t charge for the game, but revenue is generated through sold snacks that are needed to join the game in the first place.

* A brand needs initial contacts to get the campaign of the ground (5). The first people that spread the word are very important, since the overall value of a network increases with the square of the number of users, as the Metcalfe law prescribes. (Carl Shapiro 1999) There is a critical mass point too, indicating the minimum of users needed for the campaign to succeed (6). This is especially essential with multiplayer games like Tohato’s that can’t be played individually.

* A first mover advantage entails that in the initial phases the campaign should have no competitors in the perception of the users (7). It is unclear whether Tohato’s campaign was perceived as being something new, but according to marketing authors Alan Moore and Tomi T. Ahonen the campaign is remarkable to say the least. (Ahonen 2008)

* And finally, when striving for a successful campaign it should be build for scalability (8). It needs to be able to handle the amount of eyeballs you’re hoping to attract. In the case of Tohato it had to digest up to 100.000 page views per day from a total of 10.000 participants. (Hakuhodo 2008).

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