Using Videos to Get People Talking About Your Brand - Bournville Tells You How

As a brand, nothing beats the heady feeling accompanied by the knowledge that people are talking favorably about you, and this is driven purely by a positive engagement.

Brands today are so driven by marketing expenditure and push that they forget the power of pull. They fail to realize that pulling people to engage with their communication is more valuable than pushing your message across to them.

And this is the chief reason behind the lack of innovation in terms of content marketing. There are very few brands on social media who are actively trying to create content that is specifically created to drive their marketing.

In this context, I find Bournville’s Marriage Proposal Video a masterstroke in content marketing.

Content Marketing at its Best

To the uninitiated, here is the Marriage Proposal Video that has been going viral on the Internet:

The video, undoubtedly, is hilarious. But at the same time, it is a great marketing vehicle for Bournville. With subtle placements in the video, Bournville has managed to turn an interesting video into an advertisement.

The mini-train interrupting the boy’s “sweet” proposal epitomizes the brand’s not-so-sweet positioning which has been its brand communication for a while now.

The fact that the video ends on a not-so-sweet note and the girl in the background narrating “I thought it was sweet.”are subtle, but great ways to market yourself.

Moreover, since the video is shot amateurishly and involves real-life characters, people are lapping it up. The video has gone viral since then and has thousands of people talking about it.

It has received more than 1.5 million views, and this number continues to rise even as you read this.

Wake Up to The Power of Videos

I hope this campaign by Bournville acts as a wake up call to all the Indian brands out there who are using YouTube just a repository to upload their TVCs. This video has shown that it doesn’t take popular celebs to make something go viral. Neither do you need to actively plug your brand within it.

All you need is to create content that is funny, interesting or out-of-the-box and let people do the rest. Given them a reason to talk about your content. In fact, this video was not uploaded on their official YouTube channel at all. It was uploaded by a user has been shared multiple times from there. How difficult can this be to achieve?

A lot of brands want to create “viral videos” but fail to make any substantial effforts for it. Bournville has shown them that a concept as simple as a guy getting hit for being too sweet can get people to share it with their friends.

I hope to see other brands learn from Bournville and approach videos with a different mindset.