Jason Keath from SocialFresh calls the popularity mirage “a marketer’s inclination to imitate popular or splashy brands with unrelatable advantages.”

You’ve probably seen the mirage. You wake up to an inbox full of newsletters detailing a marketing stunt that everyone in the office is already talking about. And you think, would it work for us?

Usually, those brands have a few key advantages:

• Powerful resources like more money, brand awareness, celebrity, PR connections
• An established audience or fandom
• A unique business model that affects strategy

For instance, everyone was talking about Barbie in Q3, and rightly so. With a $150 million dollar budget, the top-selling toy in history, and no shortage of celebrity talent, their marketing team wasn’t exactly starting from square one.

Still, we saw a lot of underperforming imitations in the days that followed, because the popularity mirage is hard to resist.

Read Keath’s full blog at SocialFresh.

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