How Banned Brands Come To Light: A Content Analysis on Stealth Marketing Cases From Turkey

Changing marketing practices, legal regulations and new media channels push brands to use different marketing tactics. In all changing marketing tactics, stealth marketing shines out due to restrictive law that forbids some brands and sectors to run a marketing campaign in Turkey. As a term stealth marketing is a technique to deliver the brand's message to the people who should not realize the message is received as a marketing or sales purpose. In this way, brands are able to deliver desired messages for their target publics without getting caught by any restrictive laws. As the main channel to be used under this purpose is social media that shines out compared to traditional. The main reason for that is when traditional media is easy to control by the laws but social media doesn't. In this paper, we made a research about how these banned brands run a stealth marketing campaign in Turkey. Three brands that run a clear stealth marketing campaign from the alcoholic beverages sector are chosen and their campaign and it's social media site (Instagram) are analyzed with content analysis method for six months of duration. Analyzes show that brands use made up names and identities for running their campaigns to avoid getting caught from laws. Also, it is clear that all made up names that brands use have very similar corporate identities with the original brand. According to social media analyzes, storytelling shines out as a main structure of brands use in their Instagram posts and creating an interaction is also shines out as the main strategy that brands use in their stealth marketing campaigns.