Hyper marketing refers to a concept tied to unicorn brands, focusing more on the marketing side. It means brand new companies (under 1 year old) that promote themselves with very large marketing budgets. This has become quite common, as we see many new companies pushing their marketing messages aggressively, both online and offline. These businesses invest heavily in marketing to boost brand awareness quickly and effectively.
The question is, is this (hyper marketing) strategy effective? In my opinion, hyper marketing can be a double edged sword due to many valid reasons. Let’s touch on the good and bad points of hyper marketing. Yeah?
The Benefits
#1 Quick Brand Awareness
Any marketer can tell you this is no-brainer strategy, all you need to do is to use hundreds thousands or even millions of dollars within the next few weeks, on Google, Facebook, Instagram, bus stops, Youtube, buildings, newspapers, TV radio commercial and all other advertising mediums you can imagine, your brand will take off from there. The idea is to ‘flood’ the entire country with your brand messages and that’s it. Your brand will receive quick brand awareness and it is just that.
#2 Grow Your List!
Another objective of a quick and fast marketing strategy is that you can grow your consumer community at a very fast speed by offering them quick deals and discounts on products, if they sign up for your mailing list or make the first order on your app. The key is to quickly build a strong list of potential customers which you can further sell them more products and services via email marketing or apps notification marketing. Sounds cool?
#3 Gain Fast Media Attention
The media loves new brands, they love to speak with the founders of these new brands and thereby create more media coverage for their brands and products. Suddenly after the few weeks of massive brand awareness, the brand becomes the talk of the town and gets invited to more media coverage by the local journalists. More media coverage will hence help to improv one brand awareness and brand credibility.
The Disadvantages of Hyper Marketing
So as you can see from the above, we really can see some measurable advantages from hyper marketing. So what are the disadvantages of hyper marketing then?
#1 Business Sustainability
The key question, one must also ask himself or herself, is how do I make sure the business is sustainable for the next 10, 20 or even 100 years down the road? Hyper marketing might increase brand awareness in a short span of time, but will the consumers remember the brand? Will they feel good about the brand or want to buy the brand’s products and services on a consistent basis? How is it by giving offers and discounts to first time buyers, can one business retain long term brand loyalty? We are not talking about how the business is going to start making profits but how will the business “breakeven” from the initial weeks and months of spending on massive marketing campaign if they have a very small profit margin per product sold?
The key to any business sustainability is perhaps a deeper look into one’s business model. What is the cost per lead and how much sales revenue is made from the total marketing budget invested? If the brand simply just wants to hyper market for awareness without a clear direction into business sustainability, then it may be experiencing the fate to that of a unicorn company eventually. Looks good on the outside, but inside – messy.
Likewise, we can look at some sustainable businesses around us, from the simple cafe owners to the middle sized corporations, which have been making strong business profits “quietly”, employing more people consistently, building more revenue with the right amount of marketing budget, loyal customers and some great product and services. They have no need for hyper marketing to reach that level of long term business sustainability.
Therefore, hyper marketing can make companies famous supersonic fast, but when it comes to business sustainability, it is still a big question mark.
#2 Market Protection
The other disadvantage of hyper marketing is whether the nature of the brand or product has a unique advantage where competitors find it very hard to follow. Say if it is a e-commerce platform or a new deals website, it can be easily copied by another brand with, yes, another similar hyper marketing budget backed by a powerful angel investor or vc. Brand loyalty from customers or merchants is another factor for poor market protection. Will the brand’s customers or its merchants exclusively engage the brand’s services? Or they can also engage the other competitors’ products and services?
Hence, if the company does not have a very fantastic product that competitors find it very difficult to copy, then it is not suitable for hyper marketing. This is because anyone can create any competing brand out of the blue to take away some of its market share.
So what is the best solution to compete with these competitors? More hyper marketing? Nah, it can make things worse. It is to create a sustainable brand with a strong community of loyal consumers.
In summary, hyper marketing may seem like the best strategy for any new brand with heavy marketing dollars, it is still important to look further in the long term especially when it comes to business sustainability as well as better market protection.