• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Guerilla Marketing

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

kovboi

Member
Joined
Sep 10, 2005
http://www.overclockers.com/tips01017/

There was a very long thread a while back on viral marketing and corporate shills posting on enthusiast forums, so I was more than a little interested to see these sentiments voiced on the front page:
whether this is deliberate or not, hasn't this proved to be great guerilla marketing; some pretty good advance bang for minimal buck?

I think so, and if that's the case, shouldn't AMD be doing the same thing? Even if there's no Intel "conspiracy," wouldn't it benefit AMD to start their own?
What's the downside? Some control freak will freak out if a few samples slip out of his/her/their control? Give them a week's worth of Xanax if you have to, and let the product speak for itself. If it's good, it will speak for itself, loudly.
I agree that there is little downside for AMD or Intel. The downside, I think, is in inviting corporate shills to display their cherry-picked (and obtained gratis) merchandise in exchange for positive reviews and to ramp up purchase orders. Arguably this is damaging to the social fabric within the community and the general level of trust (however fragile) between hardware companies and consumers. AMD and Intel and survive this, however, since they have a near-monopoly on the processor market.

Now, is it morally any different from any other form of advertising? That's for you to judge. But is it effective? Most people on this forum will sniff out guerilla marketers faster than politicians steal lollipops from babies. So whether it is successful is the key question. As has been pointed out before, choice is pretty limited in the hardware market, anyway, so how much of the market share is really shifted by guerilla marketing?
 
LOL, most ignored thread, ever! :p
mods, please feel free to delete...
 
OK, I'll say something then

kovboi said:
so how much of the market share is really shifted by guerilla marketing?

Almost zero, a small fraction of 1%, probably about 90% of desktop computers will be sold by big OEMs, most to businesses, educational/government organisations and familes. The sales of businesses, educational and government machines are determined by three factors, initial price, crooked business/personal connections, and cost to run. The sales of family machines by, initial price, sales talk and flashy advertising, and usually ill informed opinons of friends. Most of the rest are probably sold by smaller computer businesses, and barring a few (Falcon Northwest, Rock Direct, etc) overclocking and performance aren't much of an issue, and people are buying because of the same reasons as the above in most cases.

This probably leaves at most 1% of PC users who know what hardware they want, and why they want it (whether they are single home builders or CAD engineers getting a company to put some together is irellevant). These are the only people whom guerilla marketing is likely to have much of an effect upon, and out of these, it is only likely to be a deciding factor in the cases of the real enthusiasts who are building a system at the time, and we are hardly a big group as far as intel or AMD is concerned.

However, they do sell FX and extreme edition chips, even if they do not represent a huge chunk of their sales, and I would suspect that a significant proportion of the sales of these parts can be influenced by guerilla marketing.
 
I doubt the overclockers themselves are knowingly advertising for the manufacturer. Someone like Stoolman mentioned in the article probably don't have any direct connection with Intel as he denies but probably got it "from someone who got it from someone who has some connections". You don't really need any more than a anonymous ebay account and drop a line at an extreme forum like this. Some of the processors will end up under LN2 and there is your advertisement.

http://cgi.tw.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI...0370&ssPageName=MERC_VIC_ReBay_Pr3_PcY_BIN_IT

So Intel/AMD/ATI/nVidia could be the ones supplying these ES processors and making sure that the end up the right places, but if this is the case I think most of the overclockers themselves know they are "pawns".
 
This isn't new.

DFI has been doing this with motherboards via a member RIGHT ON OUR FORUMS, I did alot of complaining about it but no one really cared.

2nd, the reason AMD doesn't do it because they probably can't get as good results....duh...

3rd...this has been happening for a good year or so already....not really a suprise.

4th YES IT IS NOT TOTALLY ETHICAL.
 
Back