|
Originally published in
the Sunday Telegraph |
Copyright © 2005 Helena
Echlin |
Review
(Page 1)
Pssst! Have you heard about this amazing
sausage?
What makes a person want to become a secret
agent - for advertisers? Helena Echlin reveals the seductive power of the
strange new consumer trend that drove her to sing the praises of `Al Fresco
Chicken Sausages'
`Have you got any Al Fresco Chicken Sausages?” I trilled to the man behind the supermarket meat counter.
“Al what?”
“Al Fresco Chicken Sausages.”
He shook his head. “We don't stock them.”
“Well, you should.” I told him. “They're delicious! And they're healthy too!”
“Put it on a comment card,” he said, turning away. Humph. For a butcher, he
didn't seem very interested in sausages. I hovered by the frozen lamb chops and
pretended to make a call: “Darling, I'm sorry,” I yelled into my mobile phone, “they
don't have your favourite Al Fresco Chicken Sausages!”
I looked around to see who had overheard: just a little old lady. I positioned
myself near a fat couple, continuing to babble loudly: “No, they don't have
those yummy AL FRESCO CHICKEN SAUSAGES!” I looked up and caught the butcher
staring at me. Was I being paranoid, or did he look suspicious? But whatever
his misgivings, he'd never guess the truth: I was working in San Francisco for BzzAgent, an American marketing firm that uses ordinary
people to promote its clients' products in everyday conversation. I was not in
fact a sausage lover, but a secret agent.
Since the late 1990s, companies have been paying “trendsetters” to promote
products (hiring attractive actors, for example, to pose with camera phones).
But now the marketing men have discovered that ordinary people will work just
as well -- and you don't have to pay them. Instead, BzzAgents
accumulate points that they can exchange for free goods. The company's clients
include Ralph Lauren, Coca-Cola and Penguin, and its agents talk up everything
from beverages to books. As I write, 76,983 Americans have registered as BzzAgents. Founded a few years ago by a young entrepreneur
named Dave Balter, BzzAgent
is preparing to launch in the
Deluged with an estimated 1,500 advertisements a day, consumers have started
to screen them out. Yankelovich Partners, a
BzzAgent's initial campaign was for a first novel
called The Frog King by Adam Davies. BzzAgents
plugged the book to their friends and read it ostentatiously on the subway. In
three months, according to the publisher, Penguin, the book sold what it was
expected to sell in a year.
Critics of WOM foresee a sci-fi dystopia in which
you can't trust anybody. But Balter claims WOM is an
improvement on traditional advertising. Since Bzz-
Agents are volunteers, they are at liberty to pick only products they genuinely
like. And, he says, product recommendation is part of conversation anyway: “It's
something we do all day, every day - it's the way we communicate. It's part of
our social fabric.” I found it hard to believe that WOM was as natural and
authentic as Balter claimed. And I couldn't fathom
why so many had volunteered their services, particularly when I discovered that
70 per cent of agents don't even bother to claim their freebies. The only way
to find out the truth was to become a BzzAgent
myself.
It took five minutes to sign up. I simply filled out a form with my personal
details and answered some questions about my interests and social life. Then I
clicked my way through two online training sessions: Bzz
Boot Camp and
Agents must wait to be invited on campaigns - a decision based on
psychographic and demographic factors, such as age and location - and can then
decide whether to accept. But when I called the Central Hive (that is, Bzz-Agent headquarters) and told them I was a journalist,
they gave me two campaigns straight away: Al Fresco Chicken Sausage and a book
called Generation Kills, an account of spending a month in
When I got home, I cooked some of them: Roasted Garlic flavour,
not bad (there are six other varieties). While I ate, I studied my BzzGuide, a pamphlet containing product information and
talking points. As a way to stimulate some sausage chit-chat, the guide
helpfully provided this “easy to remember” and “conversational” phrase: “Al
fresco makes a perfect meal! The flavours are
fantastic - it's all-natural, healthy, and easy!” The guide also suggested “BzzTriggers” (situations that might be favourable
for bringing up the product) and “BzzTargets” (people
likely to be interested in the product). For the Al Fresco campaign, a BzzTrigger might be “Eating or talking about food”, and a BzzTarget might be “People who love sausages”.
But I had a BzzProblem. Even if I convinced some “people
who love sausages” that they should try Al Fresco, it was unlikely that they'd
want to trek to
determined.” Well, I would be too, undeterred by
anything (not even the peculiar Roasted Garlic aftertaste). I wouldn't let
moral scruples cramp my style either. BzzAgents are
not required to conceal their identities, but I thought I'd be more effective
if I did.
The first stage of my undercover operation was when I added my review of
Generation Kill to the 60-plus reviews it had already received on Amazon (all
but three were glowing - could this be the work of other Bzzy
bees?) Then I stopped by www.epicurious.com, a cooking site where you can post
comments on their recipes. A search in their database for “sausage” yielded 383
results. I picked “Sausage and Egg Casserole with Sun-Dried Tomatoes and Mozzarella”,
reasoning that with so many other ingredients, the taste of Al Fresco would
hardly be noticed. “Great with Al Fresco!” I
commented. Then I felt bored. Bzzing in cyberspace
wasn't that much fun. I wanted to Bzz people in the
real world, where I could see their reactions.
That night, a fashion designer I know was having a show at a friend's house.
It was one thing to deceive strangers, but could I deceive my friends?
“I've been doing a lot of cooking lately,” I told Damien and Ina. “My
husband and I have discovered these delicious sausages - we just can't stop
eating them.” I felt a pang of guilt. I didn't see Ina and Damien that often.
Why was I wasting this precious time on sausages? But they didn't appear to
notice anything was wrong.
“I'm German, I love sausage,” said Damien. Perfect!
“What kind of sausage?” asked Ina.
“Al Fresco Chicken Sausages,” I said. “You can only get them in
“You go all the way to
“It's worth it for these sausages!” I insisted. But they were already
backing away. Never mind. I turned to my friend Chris.
“I have discovered the greatest sausages,” I said.
“What kind?”
“Al Fresco.”
“I'll check them out,” he promised. Ha! A direct BzzHit!
I was good at this. Maybe I could even get in the top 100! Inspired by my
success, I found myself gabbling away about Al Fresco to everyone I met.
“I think it's time to leave,” said my husband Jordan, who was the only one
who knew about my secret Bzz identity.
“But I'm having fun,” I protested. He shook his head.
“People think you're weird.”
As I lay in bed that night, I realised why I
didn't sound natural: people just don't talk about sausages that much. In fact,
I couldn't remember a single conversation I'd ever had about sausages. But I'd
had hundreds of conversations recommending books, music, films, and I'd
definitely shown off my iPod. We talk about some
things more than others. Marketers call these “conversation products” or
products with a high “buzz quotient”. So what makes us talk about something?
According to Emmanuel Rosen, former marketing executive and author of The
Anatomy of Buzz (not associated with BzzAgent), we
talk about products that are complicated (software), expensive (cars),
innovative (the iPod) or observable (cell phones). We
also talk about “personal experience products” -- things that must be
experienced to be assessed, such as holidays.
BzzAgents find that opportunities to recommend
products come from unexpected quarters. Take 19-year-old BzzAgent
Dagostml, whose sample report I read. When a weeping
friend locked herself in the women's bathroom of Dagostml's
college dormitory, Dagostml counselled
the girl about her boyfriend troubles, while tenderly applying the No Puffery
Eye Gel she was Bzzing. Would the youthful Dagostml have comforted her friend had there been no chance
to earn BzzPoints?
“Normally,” she wrote in her report, “I'd just turn around and leave her
there to deal with her own problems. But hey, I'm a BzzAgent
now and I have to take every opportunity I can get.”
I'd read in the BzzAgent Code of Conduct that I
should be “confident, communicative, friendly, natural, smart, outgoing and
powerful”. I now realised that a BzzAgent
must be Machiavellian too.
Instead of seeing my friends as people, I resolved to see them only as
sausage consumers. Instead of waiting for a BzzTrigger,
I would create one. I called our friend Collin and invited him for brunch the
next day. Arriving with a hangover, he was in the mood for the big greasy
breakfast I cooked.
“What do you think of these Al Fresco sausages, Collin? Aren't they
scrumptious?” “Yum,” he said. Bzzz! I thought. Then I
noticed that Collin was pushing the sausages round his plate.
“What do you really think?”
“They're so-so,” he admitted. After brunch, I felt ashamed for forcing
Collin to eat the so-so sausages. And I was worried that I'd betrayed the Code
of Conduct. BzzAgents were supposed to give only
their honest opinions. And the truth was I found the sausages bland.
So are BzzAgents really honest about what they
think? For one thing, it's impossible for them to sample some of the products
that they Bzz -- holidays, for example. And research
suggests that psychological factors may complicate their judgment. In one
experiment in 1990, the behavioural economists Daniel
Kahneman, Jack Knetsch and
Richard Thaler found that when two items of equal
value (a pen and a coffee mug) are handed to a group of people and the chance
to swap is offered, hardly anyone does. Since it's unlikely that all the
participants are handed the object they prefer, the economists conclude that
having something makes people value it more - the so-called “endowment effect”.
Maybe BzzAgents rate the products not because they
like them, but simply because they have them.
In fact, BzzAgents don't love everything they Bzz. Last autumn, Folgers coffee company asked BzzAgent to generate WOM for their Home Café brewing
machine. Even the endowment effect could not make the agents love the Home
Café, which leaked water, emitted smoke and, after all that, brewed only
lukewarm coffee.
If BzzAgents don't always value the products they Bzz, I wondered, why do they do it? The freebies must be
part of the allure. But there's more to the phenomenon. Perusing the website
where BzzAgents can share tips, I learnt that some do
it because they consider themselves pioneers in “reality advertising”, or
because they get to try new products first. BzzAgent Bertalander, a housewife with three small children, wrote: “I
have no idea at times what is current or new. But with Bzz
I have an edge . . . I can talk to my friends about some new cool things.”
Meanwhile, rascal-robert, another BzzAgent,
admitted he did it for the power trip, or, as he put it, “the noticeable influence
on the purchases of family, friends and colleagues”.
BzzAgent appears to make people feel that what
they have to say matters -- in a world where, increasingly, they feel it
doesn't. In 1966 and again in 1986 the market researcher Louis Harris asked
consumers whether they agreed with statements such as “I feel left out of
things going on around me” and “What I think doesn't matter any more.” In 1966,
only 9 per cent felt left out; in 1986 it was 37 per cent. In 1966, 36 per cent
felt what they thought didn't matter; in 1986, 60 per cent did. But why do we
feel so disempowered? Professor Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of
Choice, says it's because of the dizzying array of options before us (the
average supermarket, for example, sells more than 30,000 items). “We have so
many choices that no one has the energy or time to investigate them all . . .
Instead of feeling in control, we feel unable to cope.” If consumers feel
increasingly powerless, then perhaps being a BzzAgent
is a way to reclaim a tiny bit of power.
I wanted to find out whether BzzAgents typically
concealed their status, and I asked Balter if I could
interview some of them. Apparently, their “privacy policy” makes it impossible
for me to be put in touch with anyone, even if they were to remain anonymous. I
found it hard to believe that not a single one of the 77,000 agents would be
willing to speak to me. Perhaps BzzAgent was afraid
of what its Bzzy bees might tell me.
Balter claimed in an e-mail to me that “we ask
agents to be open and honest”. In fact, the Code of Conduct simply advises
agents to “feel free” to disclose their status. It's a suggestion rather than a
requirement. And I'm willing to bet that most of them don't act on that
suggestion. I say this because, in my experience, the secret identity was what
made Bzzing fun - at least as much as coolness,
influence and the rest.
It remains to be seen whether Bzzing will be as
popular here as in
If enough people become Bzz-Agents, could Bzzing replace the billboard, for example? Balter believes that WOM and old-school advertising simply
serve different functions: “Traditional advertising is very effective at
driving awareness of a product or service, but does little to build a company
or brand's credibility.” A survey published this week to coincide with World
Book Day suggests that WOM may be more of a threat to conventional advertising
than Balter realises. One
in four people polled said the last book they read was based on what a
colleague or family member had told them, with almost a third of under-35s
suggesting it was the most important factor. Only 6 per cent, meanwhile, said
they chose a book because they saw it advertised.
I myself was a feeble BzzAgent (I did inspire one
friend to buy some sausage -- but sadly, not Al Fresco). Most BzzAgents, according to the company, are far more effective
at driving sales. And whether or not WOM is the future of advertising, it may
well be the future of market research: BzzAgents'
reports provide rich consumer feedback. Johnnie Moore, marketing consultant and
co-author of the book Beyond Branding, says: “Compare [BzzAgent]
to boring old market research, where you can spend thousands for some
theoretical information . . . whereas this way you actually get a ton of
feedback and get to sell some stuff in the process.”
I still wanted to know if people would enjoy being BzzAgents
as much if they had to shed their disguise. What would happen if I shed mine? I
was afraid that if I stopped being a secret agent, I would just be, well,
someone who really liked sausages. I was afraid that instead of being cool, I'd
just be a drone. But Balter insisted that BzzAgents were “enthusiastic” about Bzzing
openly. The evening of the day we brunched, I phoned Collin and revealed my
secret. There was a long pause.
“You mean you invited me to breakfast just so you could buzz me?”
“Well, not just for that reason,” I protested. But Collin wasn't amused. After a couple of minutes of cursory conversation, he made an excuse to ring off. For the rest of the day, I felt slightly sick - but I couldn't tell whether that was from my guilty conscience, or maybe just the Al Fresco Chicken Sausages.
|
Originally published in
the Sunday Telegraph |
Copyright © 2005 Helena
Echlin |