Dark marketing is a guerrilla marketing tactic known as dark marketing and is a marketing practice associated with undercover marketing, stealth marketing, and buzz marketing.
As the name suggests, It consists of a process that is tried to be imposed on the customer and includes this situation implicitly without making the customer feel it. For example, have you ever wondered why we eat popcorn in movie theaters or where does the habit of eating seeds from the past come from, especially while watching TV series? Your thoughts definitely point to the right door.
Popcorn is the basis of dark marketing, which emerged from a practice that emerged in the 1950s and has survived to the present day and is taken as an example. Yes, yes, in the 1950s, the perception of eating popcorn in movie theaters was imposed and it became a habit. This resulted in a significant increase in product production and sales.
In dark marketing, it is the name given to the effort to create a potential customer base by placing some products and brands in the unconscious mind of the customers through a star or a well-known person. In other words, dark marketing is the realization of marketing activities without the knowledge of customers and without making them feel. This type of marketing is also called agent type or disguised marketing.
Although it is argued that its aim is to provide the product that the customer wants or needs without making the customer feel the marketing activities, the main purpose is to create what the customer doesn’t need as a need. It consists of the situation-finding form, which is the task of a typical marketer.
Among the companies that used dark marketing the most, cigarette companies were doing it before bans and legal regulations. Although all advertisements of tobacco and tobacco products and alcoholic beverages are prohibited in our country with legal regulations, cigarette manufacturers are using a beautiful and unimaginable tactic these days.
At the same time, it affects the customer less harmlessly, which creates decreases in the sales of companies that sell tobacco products. Well, have you come across the news about the explosion of electronic cigarettes circulating in the news recently? Doesn’t this situation frighten users and lead them to regular tobacco products? And do you think it’s 100 percent true that e-cigarettes are really exploding and that’s why consumers are making a comeback to regular cigarettes? Of course, there is such a problem in electronic cigarettes, but it is necessary to wink at a secret dark marketing tactic underlying this news and its reflection to the consumer.
As this is the case, there are many different tactics of dark marketing. There is also the widespread use of dark marketing through the use of key actors. At the same time, the Efes Pilsen Cup Basketball, which was held in our country before the legal regulations and bans and was organized by Efes, the Yeni Raki Meze and Music Festival, which was organized under the leadership of Yeni Raki and made a great impression, and the motto “There is life on the street” we still come across in the streets of some districts such as Beyoğlu and Beşiktaş. The Efes brand under its name also stands out.
In dark marketing, the brand name, logo, or open communication may appear in situations where it is prohibited. In this case, it provides a direct connection with the brand by using the sub-elements identified with the brand’s character. Sometimes this is art direction and typographic elements, sometimes color scale, and sometimes product design. Even if the black tape is attached to the brand of the clothes on the contestants, so that there are no advertisements in the competition programs, you can easily understand which brand that product belongs to. In recent years, we have come across the most popular applications of dark marketing in Turkish TV series. Apart from the phones used in the Medcezir series, which said goodbye to the screen a few years ago, Samsung provided a very good advertisement of ringtones and watches compatible with the newly released phone at that time. In that period and in the sales of the series and phone ringtones, it made a serious profit in the Note series. At the same time, Apple products, which we encounter in many TV series, are also an example of hidden dark marketing.
In this way, we have explained with examples the relevance of product placements in movies and dark marketing. Even if it didn’t take much place with the definitions at first, if you more or less followed or came across the series in the examples we gave, if you caught sight of product placements in the movies, albeit unnoticed, we could agree on this.