Murketing is a nebulous advertising strategy which is used to advance a brand in ways which often seem unconventional or even a bit nonsensical. One of the best examples of murketing can be seen in the advertising techniques used for the Red Bull energy drink. Murketing appears to be largely a 21st century phenomenon, and it is especially popular among the coveted “Generation Y” or “Millennial” market.
This term is a portmanteau of “marketing” and “murky,” emphasizing the fact that murketing is basically just very murky and sometimes confusing marketing. A marketing campaign erects a billboard that says “Buy Brand X Soap,” while a murketing campaign might use the same billboard to make an illogical statement, accompanied with no explanation whatsoever, and then tie the billboard into a larger marketing campaign. Murketing builds a buzz around products, creating a vague brand identity with lots of room for maneuvering in the future.
In a typical advertising campaign, say for a brand of laundry soap, the advertisements clearly focus on the fact that the product advertised is soap, and that it is extremely effective. The advertisements would feature scenes with laundry, often demonstrating the effectiveness of that particular soap when compared to other, “generic” brands. As consumers were exposed to the advertising, they would grow to recognize the brand, and become attached to it, so when they arrived at the store for laundry soap, they would be more inclined to buy the soap they saw advertised.
Murketing campaigns, however, are never this explicit, and they can take a wide variety of forms. Many firms which specialize in murketing focus on new media, distributing viral videos, infiltrating chat rooms, and establishing promotional sites in the forms of blogs or mysterious treasure hunts across the Internet. The goal is to slowly and thoroughly penetrate the desired market, creating an image around the product rather than focusing on mere brand recognition.
Many murketing campaigns market a lifestyle, rather than a specific product. In the laundry soap example above, for example, murketing for the soap would emphasize the fact that people who washed their clothes with that soap got better partners, enjoyed more popularity, or lived adventurous, action-packed lifestyles. The soap company might also distribute strange viral videos that had nothing whatsoever to do with soap, or use murketing connections to send teams out into the street to pass out free soap or engage in publicity stunts which draw attention to the brand without specifically marketing it.
