Anyone coming to Gulshan in the morning through any of the following 3 forms – CNG, Black and Yellow Taxi Cab – will know how time consuming and frustrating it is to convince any taxi or cab to travel to Gulshan at that time. Reason? Their belief is once they drop you off at Gulshan, they will not find anyone to pick and drop anywhere else at that time of the day. While the merit of such a belief is arguable, have you ever pondered how unanimously they stand in that belief? No matter from where you try to manage a ride at Gulshan in the morning, have you ever stopped and wondered exactly  how everyone of the CNG and cab drivers came to know of this?

Thats the power of urban legend for you. Once a few knows, in a moment the rest knows. Thats how it works. Remeber a few months ago, when an urban legend “Mobile handsets are exploding” came to existence? The idea took exactly 24 hours to spread to every corner of the nation without a single financial investment. If you can harness that kind of power in your marketing, yours will be one success story that itself will spread like an urban legend.

The trick of doing so is stated below.

1. Make sure the message you are spreading is news worthy. Meaning – people will want to share it with someone

2. Make sure you deploy traditional media like TV, radio at the latter stage of the campaign – after the phenomenon has taken a shape. Reason – if everyone knows about it, then the novelty and sharing value wears off.

3. People will always want to be the center of attention. One easy way of doing it is sharing with others something amusing that they dont know of. Allow them to do so with your message and facilitate them in any way possible. If you can facilitate to make them look cool and knowledgeable, they will do your job on your behalf.

Now only if anyone could do something about these CNG and CAB drivers so that they can bring me to Gulshan everyday!