‘Teasers’ are a commonly used form of promotion employing a series of cryptic advertisements preceding a larger campaign for a product launch or event. The teaser campaign generates interest and buzz by initially keeping secret what the firm is about to sell and focuses on the human desire for mystery and suspense.
One of my first recollections of a teaser campaign was that conducted by Cadbury before the launch of its Wispa bar in the early 1980s. Adverts started to appear with the single phrase, ‘Have you heard the Wispa?’, but keeping the product a secret. This raised considerable interest in the press and was considered an inventive way to gain both customer Attention and Interest, the first two stages of AIDA; the acronym summarising the sales process of ‘Attention, Interest, Desire and Action’ (E. K. Strong 1925). Certainly, one way to capture attention is to surprise the customer with something novel and intriguing. Once the customer’s attention has been captured, the firm can maintain interest by a ‘drip drip’ campaign slowly revealing the true nature of the product while retaining the element of mystery. What perhaps has changed since the iconic Wispa campaign is that the mystery of the teaser can be multiplied many fold through the use of the web and the creation of viral marketing campaigns.
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In several recent posts, I have considered the increasing popularity of viral marketing. An ingenious take on the generating a viral marketing message is the ‘product page’ of the HEMA, a Dutch department store with 150 stores across the Netherlands. I know that the link to this page has been doing the rounds fror quite a while, and I am doing my bit by continuing the process.
