kidmercury

Thus far in our series on Superhero Marketing, we've established the following:

Phase I: This is about separating the customer from the world he/she knows by understanding and appealing to their psychological desires.

Phase II: After separation comes initiation, in which the company empowers the customer by psychologically liberating him. This is largely about understanding the psychology of your customer, and creating and presenting your product/service accordingly.

In the third and final phase of Superhero Marketing, the customer, after having been psychologically liberated, is sent off into the world.

And that's it. If you have truly liberated the customer psychologically, he/she will naturally go about telling people about your product/service. They will want to tell people about you -- they will choose to. After all, they are now heroes, and if heroes are defined by one thing it is that: their ability to choose.

Below are examples from the movies that are guiding us along in this mini-series on Superhero Marketing: The Matrix, Fight Club, and V for Vendetta.

Of course, it doesn't hurt to help them spread your message, and thus the standard viral tools -- making it easy for people to link to you, to email people about you, to bookmark you, are all good and well. That is outside the scope of this post, although if you're interested in the execution of that check out these links:

• Tips for Optimizing Viral Marketing Campaigns
• SitePoint discussion on Viral Marketing Techniques

Real-life Examples of Superhero Marketing

To help make the framework of Superhero Marketing more practical and accessible, consider the following companies. Do you think they are practicing Superhero Marketing?

Victoria's Secret. Can we say Victoria's Secret liberates women from feelings of sexual inadequacy, feelings of unattractiveness, feelings of low self-worth?


Maybe it does; maybe women can purchase Victoria's Secret products and end up feeling more attractive, and hence liberated from their previous condition. Alternatively, maybe it is a lie -- maybe it appeals to a female sense of inadequacy, but does not actually solve the problem, acting instead as a psychological band aid of sorts; something that allows the issue to be addressed but not solved, so that psychological pain is temporarily relieved but truth and healing are not fully experienced. Most likely whether or not the image helps a woman strive towards and experience psychological liberation depends upon the individual woman and her psychological status. One thing, though, is for certain: superhero marketing only works if the psychological liberation you offer is true. Truth, in this case, is not a matter of science or objective fact, but rather of belief: both you and your customers have to believe your product as psychologically liberating, otherwise, they won't talk about it. Put another way, the more people believe it, the more they'll talk about it. And if they're not talking about it, the psychological prison still exists. (Note: There are some exceptions to this, typically if you are selling something related to a social stigma. For instance, if you are selling some kind of STD testing device, your product may psychologically relieve people of the anxiety of not knowing if you have an STD -- but because STDs are a fairly large social stigma in most parts of the world, it's unlikely to get talked about no matter what.)

Google. Do you remember the world before Google? It seems so long ago, perhaps because of how far Google brought us: pre-Google, search results pages took forever to load, consisted of little more than porn, and were generally useless. For all practical purposes, there was no real web; if you wanted decent information on the Internet, your choices did not go too far beyond the walled garden media strategies of companies like AOL and Yahoo!. Users knew there was a bigger and better world, but there was no way of getting there. They were frustrated; the companies had imposed their reality upon them, essentially creating a prison for their mind.


And then, in true Promethean spirit, Google came along and delivered search that worked. They did very little advertising and focused on building a good search engine. The geeks found it, told their friends, and a few years later, Google became omnipresent: everyone wanted to be a part of it; users loved the search engine, and web publishers loved the traffic.

Of course, in the Promethean myth there is the notion that there is no real liberation; we simply trade one prison for another. And surely, many web publishers would agree that Google, once a liberator, is now a prison guard: their algorithm is kept undisclosed, their pricing system is even more protected, their algorithm is biased against new sites that haven't earned trust, it has been suggested that the Google Adsense initiative incentivizes copyright violation under current copyright law in most parts of the world....sure enough, the publishers feel imprisoned. Of course, if there is one take home point from Superhero Marketing, it is that every psychological prison represents an opportunity for a company to deliver a solution that will secure viral marketing success.

The final article in this mini-series will take a look at further resources for exploring the Monomyth and Superhero Marketing.

Other Posts in This Series

Phase I: Separation
Phase II: Initiating the Customer
Phase III: The Superhero's Return
Further Resources for Exploring Superhero Marketing