What can Kevin Bacon teach you about marketing?
Fresh on the podcast today, Ed and Tom discuss the idea of 6 degrees of separation, otherwise known as the “small world effect”.
We’re all six or fewer social connections away from each other. The world of Hollywood has taken this one step further – you can search how many connections separate Kevin Bacon from any other actor (check out “The Oracle of Bacon” for that one!).
When it comes to influencing behaviour (a change, a purchase, a call to action), that effect is reduced to “three degrees of influence” (a friend of a friend’s friend).
What can this teach us as marketers?
Most marketing messages don’t work like the Bacon effect – people have to be motivated to share a message, and they’re usually more likely to if they’ve seen a message several times from the people in their network.
- Consider your audience as a network
- Consider the relationships in your audience
- Think about how you might activate and utilise them
- Create campaigns that gets shared between people who are interested in the same thing
- Map your network and use those tools to inform your marketing (hello Herdify!)
- Check out the full episode for more detail!
