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College Kids Earn Extra Beer Money By Annoying Friends With Sales Pitches
from the talk-about-contextual-advertising... dept
With college kids still being a very lucrative market -- but those same kids ignoring traditional media sources such as TV, radio and movies -- some firms are trying to get creative. They've combined the idea of "buzz marketing" with street teams and have more or less convinced college kids to sell out their friends. Basically, the firms in question (including Microsoft), convince some college kids that, in exchange for some free product samples, they need to wander campus and tell people how awesome their products are. Sometimes there's a small stipend involved, but it sounds like that isn't always the case. Either way, this sounds a little questionable. While the article doesn't seem to suggest there's a downside to this at all and seems to think that it must work -- I'd imagine that if any of my college buddies suddenly ran up to me to tell me why Microsoft was great, I'd be especially skeptical. It just wasn't part of your everyday conversation. And getting the cool, charismatic students to say it doesn't change much at all -- it just sounds sneaky and underhanded.
Reader Comments
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Loosers
No good friend would do this. I would have to kill the ones that do - or initiate a competitive campaign to discredit the brand they are promoting in that manner. It's the pop-up ads of the campus.
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How can they know?
How can they know if you actually DID tell other kids about the product? Or if you just took the product and that's it.
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No Subject Given
This is possibly one of the most annoying things on my campus. Worst of all, kids are usually pushing credit cards. Push credit to people that have no income? Achya!
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Oops...
I see now... Should've read the whole article on that other site BEFORE posting, and not after. And you know what's worse? I'm gonna shamelessly blame the fact that I've not had my "morning coffee" yet, for that.
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Beer and college kids
Good for them they should get all the beer they want i think you guys should get off their back and let them have as many beer bongs as they want
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Old news...
Yeah when I was back in college, they did this all the time. Magazine companies especially and you know the worse thing was that the kids didn't have a clue about marketing/selling these things.
They would come, knock, and ask if I wanted magazine. I would check to see that the cost of buying through them would be more than buying directly from the vendor and share this revelation to them.
Then they would state how if I bought through them it would help them through various reasons. The most appealing was that it was to fund their college tution while the least was so that they could possibly win a trip to Cancun or Europe.
My response was usually, "so I should pay more than I have to so that YOU can go on vacation on MY dime?" At this point, they usually gave up.
These companies really need to give some sort of marketing training to these college kids if they really want to make some inroads into the college crowd.
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Yup
Yea I've seen it done on our campus a thousand times. The current trend is getting people to sign up for bank accounts and even worse credit cards. I've even seen girls go door to door doing the magazine sales thing.
Lately, and i guess this isnt the same thing, but people have been starting websites to promote stuff for companies. Last week NeedBeerMoney.com was written all over campus in chalk.
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