Are we trending yet?

Hold your Pokeballs, marketers. Anna Halliday investigates how brands should jump on board viral trends, or whether they actually bring more pain than success.

When brands should ride the rollercoaster of viral fads or let them fly on past

Let’s be honest, if you haven’t heard of Pokemon Go by now, you must be living alone in a very dark room with no internet connection. It’s taken the world by storm with well over 80 million downloads already and new countries being granted access to the app each week.

So with all this worldwide hype and players risking life and limb (literally) to ‘catch them all’, it makes sense for brands to try to capitalise on the craze and gain a bit of ‘cool by association’ style trending, right?

Hold your Pokeballs, marketers. This game isn’t for everyone.

The fact is, while some viral trends can be hugely beneficial for brands, the chances of them being an enormous waste of time, resources and damaging a brand’s image can be much higher. In fact, brands are often mocked on social media for trying to twist trends to promote their own products when they have absolute nothing in common.

Before you begin shuffling the marketing budget around and writing witty tweets with #PokemonGo, consider the following:

  • Does my brand directly align with this trend or product?
  • Will my clients understand and support this affinity? Or will we lose their respect?
  • What will I actually gain from aligning with this trend?

If there’s any doubt in your mind about whether or not you should be jumping on a viral bandwagon, you’re probably better off keeping your feet firmly on the ground and sticking to what you do best.

However, if you’re one of the lucky few and the stars align in your favour, it’s best to move fast, creatively and cover your bases!

You will want to ensure:

  • You have a creative idea that supports your brand or product
  • You have a clear objective and angle for your campaign so that it’s easily identified by new customers
  • You have social monitoring systems set up to track any brand mentions (good and bad). This goes for website analytics tracking, too.
  • Your social media team is well equipped to handle an influx of engagement and all customer service enquiries and potential complaints quickly.
  • You have a clear idea of what the brand aims to achieve with the campaign and keep all posts on track towards this goal.
  • You can execute the campaign professionally and without putting the brand in any legal risk.

If this post has made you more excited than scared about aligning with a viral trend and you’re keen to start strategising, capitalising and pokeballising… give us a call. We can turn your trending concept into a full campaign strategy to help you catch all the customers you’re chasing.

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Hold your Pokeballs, marketers. Anna Halliday investigates how brands should jump on board viral trends, or whether they actually bring more pain than success.

Anna Halliday
Digital Campaign Team Lead