Firebrand

Now that we are in a digital age, there are some products that are so easy to distribute that it may be worthwhile releasing a product just to promote another product in the future.

I do not mean the freemium model, or what I call the drug dealer model: the first taste is free but you have to pay later. This is where the brand gives you a free trial that is limited by either locked functionality or a time limited offering. We are used to seeing this in the App market and video games. But that tactic is using the same product to promote itself, and that is not what I am talking about here.

In this age you can release a related product to build buzz and excitement or introduce a new concept before you launch the big product. The intention of this is to build excitement in the core fans of the brand to build general buzz to build a good climate for the big launch to proceed in. Here are a few examples:

I was watching the Blu Ray releases of Star Trek 3-5 last night, and the only trailer on all 3 discs was for the modern Star Trex movie by JJ Abrams. This was a 3 disc collector box set in never before seen quality. While I was watching these movies a year after the modern Star Trek was released, the core fans of the original Star Trek television series and movies would have picked this set up months before the release of the modern movie. They would then talk to their friends, colleagues, and neighbours about the original Star Trek and hopefully how excited they are about the movie.

Another movie example is the release of the Thor and Captain America movies to build to the Avengers movie. Thor is scheduled to be released May 6, 2011 and Captain America is coming out July 22, 2011. These movies will be phenomenons in themselves, but they are building to one of the biggest movie launches in history: The Avengers in May 2012. The Avengers is a superhero team up movie that pairs Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, and a few others. Given the talent that have played these characters in the single movies, you can imagine the ensemble cast of the Avengers: Robert Downey Jr, Samuel Jackson, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo and the list goes on.

If you are seeing a pattern here, and that these seem to be part of the geek culture, you would be correct. But that is because they have an engergizable base of fans of those brands. But a broader market example of this was the iPhone softening the market for the iPod touch. You might think that the iPod touch is a small footnote compared to juggernaut launch of the iPhone. But there are almost as many iPod Touches sold as there are iPhones, and the iPod touch was released 6 months later. The iPhone broke the touch device concept into western culture, and built amazing excitement around it. This was excitement that some people couldn’t take advantage of because they could not afford the monthly fee of the iPhone. Along comes the iPod touch. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if they had released the iPod touch ahead of the iPhone. Apple wanted the huge paradigm shift to make their brand seem more innovative, especially since the computer and iPod innovation had stifled. If they had just introduced an iPod touch that could make calls, it would not have exploded in the way it did.

Is these a product or service you can launch to build buzz for a future, innovative product or service? This might be a tactic that has some appeal specially if your company is product driven and not great at promotion.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

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