2 Marketing Lessons from Mas Selamat

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Ah yes, Mas Selamat, the terrorist fugitive who’s gone missing due to a toilet break.

The other day I was on this 11km trail walk at Macritchie. After a long and hard trail, with some steep turns and sharp corners… when I finally reached the uppermost part of the walk, all tired and alittle exhausted, guess who greeted me…

The “Wanted: Mas Selamat” poster.

I pity the guy who had to go all the way up there to paste that poster. But yes, his face is everywhere, everywhere I tell ya. From tree walks to bus doors to lift landings. Almost as good as coke’s distribution… which now makes room for the first marketing lesson:

1. Getting noticed through active and wide advertising doesn’t mean that you’d get fans. You might just get people who are disgusted at you intruding into their every personal space. Especially if your product value is not up to par.

So recently the Singapore government announced that a $1million dollar reward is now being offered for his capture, by two anonymous contributors. I’d say the contributors must have taken some marketing course, and question why it’s taken so long for money to be offered as an incentive. Here’s marketing lesson number 2:

2. When money is involved, loyalties change. I give you an example. Say you’re a loyal customer of X store. You say you’d never divert to store Y just opposite it. All loyalties are gone if suddenly store Y gives a 70% percent discount OR store Y gives free iPhones (for some superb strategy they have). Money, when given either directly in the form of prize or when taken away less in the form of the discount is incentive for action.

1 million. Time for the Macritchie dude who pasted that poster to paste a new one with the incentive information on it. Hey, ad copywriting ya.

PS: On a more serious note, I do hope he gets caught soon, not just for the public’s sake, but for his sake too. He is a Muslim. I take this from the following hadith:

From Anas r.a. who reported that the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, “Help your brother, wronging or wronged.” A man said, “Messenger of Allah, I can help him if he is wronged but tell me how I can help him if he is wronging?” He said, “You can restrain him - or prevent him - from injustice. That is helping him.” [al-Bukhari]

Articles you might also like:

• Businesses and Undelivered Promises
• In The Footsteps of The Prophet (s.a.w.) [by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf]
• Embracing Social Media and Viral Marketing
• Review: Zaytuna Institute’s Distance Learning
• Beijing Olympics Countdown - The Bird’s Nest