New year, new beginnings, new resolutions. And after two months of spending time with family, friends and eating and drinking I finally decided to start updating my blog again. There's a lot that happened since my last blog entry but the one thing that surely caught my attention was the color updates on Facebook by my girlfriends. The last few days my Facebook feed was speckled with colors -lacy black, beige, white, red, orange..all supposedly bra colors. I couldn't for the life of me understand what was going on till I got this message from one of my friends: "just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of breast cancer awareness."
Huh? How does writing the color of my bra going to help spread breast cancer awareness? I didn't think of breast cancer when I saw the color updates. Nobody was talking a word about cancer or how it affects women. It was more of a titillation than anything else. I am sure whoever started this meme had good intentions and the tons of women who flashed all their Facebook friends did it for a good cause. But just talking about it isn't going to help the fight against this horrible disease. There should be some call to action, don't you think?
In a true marketing sense I thought this Facebook meme was fun and silly but not effective in what it was supposed to do i.e. talk about breast cancer. It's nice to see people coming up with unconventional and fun ways to promote ideas and awareness but I am sure if this campaign had more content than color, it would have been widely popular for all the right reasons.
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An unconventional approach indeed, and very impressive to see the response it generated. Reminds me of the promotion of Snakes on a Plane - the movie received tremendous hype mostly by word spreading online, and finally it was the same online network that also helped spread its negative reviews.
ReplyDeleteIn this case of the Facebook marketing, I wonder if this is just a passing fad until the next fun thing comes along. Hope that the blogosphere will talk more about these color updates and actually increase breast cancer awareness.