HyperMarketing 2

Hypermarketing 2.0 represents Highly Personal High Performance Marketing for the Brand Called You and the Company You Belong To, a new paradigm that I developed. The 2.0 suffix - denotes the next and higher level of marketing, aside from being a direct reference to the 2 hypers- highly personal and high performance. I propose that the concept is really new: if you google "hypermarketing", there are "no search results" in any on-line dictionary or wiki (as of March 7 2010 anyway).

The underlying premise of hypermarketing is that to achieve breakthroughs  in a company's marketing results, it is absolutely essential that individuals who form part of the organization consider themselves as individual brands that need to use marketing principles as well. Company brands outperform competition only if its employees have outstanding personal brands. A great example is Apple and Steve Jobs. Apple is the innovative and global brand almost everybody admires because of the personal branding of Steve Jobs. Take out Steve Jobs and the Apple brand is diminished.

While personal branding is a decade old concept, this has been explored entirely on the individual level with very little linkage to its impact on companies and organizations to which a person belongs to. Strategic marketing for corporations has been a long-accepted must, but the approach provided limited focus on the personal brands of the people tasked to develop and implement it. Even in schools and universities, there is a lopsided emphasis on corporate marketing with very little attention to the equally important dimension that is personal branding and individual marketing.

Another key feature of the hypermarketing philosophy is that true marketing power comes from within- from individual personal brands in organizations combining and synergizing to a greater corporate brand. It is therefore important to develop and inspire personal brands as a necessary prerequisite to create, maintain and defend high performing corporate brands.

The “hyper” tag has been used to represent going beyond the “ordinary”:

• In Mathematics, hyper is a prefix that denotes a fourth or higher dimension, as in hypercube or hyperplane.
• In Physics, hyper as a prefix denotes a phenomenon that is above the superlevel (hypersonic for exceptionally high speeds and hypernova for exceptionally large stars). In Starwars, Startrek and other sci-fi movies the use of hyperspeeds and hyperspace was frequently used to denote the highest velocities needed to instantly go to another dimension or jump to another part of the universe.
• In Computers, hyperlink is a common term used to allow a direct jump or connection to another part of the same document or to a totally new document, thereby saving time and effort.
• In Retailing, hypermarkets are very large superstores which offer merchandise sold in both supermarkets and department stores.

In the movie, "You've Got Mail", one of the most profound lines spoken by Tom Hanks character, when he was offering an excuse for the closure of Meg Ryan's competing business was: "It's just business, not personal." To which Meg Ryan replied: "Everything starts from being personal." When we use this movie as a management case in class, I always remind my students that the line between business and personal breaks down when an underperforming brand or business results in people losing their jobs or living a lesser quality of life.

I propose that it is now time for hypermarketing 2.0 as everything  is both business and personal.

Prof. Bong De Ungria

Concept Creator of Hypermarketing 2.0 and Contamination Marketing
http://www.hypermarketing2.com/
http://www.contaminationmarketing.com/