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With over 600 000 South African Facebook users, applications can be a great way to drive brand awareness. Local mobile software development company, Fontera, has designed many Facebook applications including brand drvien ones, and says that they are a vital element of a viral marketing campaign. “Viral marketing is an influential tool and if well implemented it can propel a brand from insignificance to global fame," says Grant Fleming, COO, Fontera.
Designing applications for Facebook are also a cost-effective method of marketing and are easy to execute. “Games can be designed for a company by either highlighting the brand’s benefits or merely introducing it in the form of background branding," says Fleming.
Apart from purpose-built applications for driving brands, applications can be built that shy away from the more obvious marketing methods yet still heighten brand awareness. Fontera's latest branded application is Lipton Habits: the application allows Facebook users to elect an old habit to combat and replace with a healthy new routine, where friends contribute to the process by posting comments of encouragement. "Consumers can interface with the Lipton brand on a deeper level as the brand becomes an integral part of the consumers’ lifestyle patterns. The idea is to position the brand favorably within people’s everyday lives by increasing the active involvement that the consumer has with the brand,” says Fleming.
Games, in particular, are a less aggressive method of marketing. For example, the Bubblewrap application is a lighthearted game that contains a leadershipboard designed to rate and rank the fastest bubblewrap poppers. It has a total of 165 211 installations at present. Fleming says this is a far more pleasant way for consumers to connect with a brand, positioning it in a different light to the usual aggressive marketing approach, where there are endless ways of building Facebook applications to heighten brand involvement. “Once the game is made and introduced as a Facebook application, companies can sit back, relax and watch their brand start spreading like a ‘virus’.”
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