At the time you thought nothing of it but the next time you’re in Waterstone’s (other good book stores are available) the name of the book suddenly pops back into your head. The next thing you know you are stood at the till with a copy of it in your hand. Congratulations, you’ve just succumbed to the marketer’s latest trick up their sleeve – subterfuge marketing.

That innocent conversation you witnessed on the train wasn’t as innocent as you first thought. It was for your benefit and was played out by two actors paid by a marketing agency to sit on the train and discuss the book at length for other passengers to overhear.

It’s a sneaky tactic, but one that more and more canny marketing companies are using to promote their clients’ products, be it books, clothing, music or the latest coffee brand to hit the high street.

Sony Ericsson, for example, notoriously used subterfuge marketing to launch a new camera phone by hiring teams of actors pretending to be tourists who wanted to have their photo taken.

Gone then are the days when we were told, “don’t believe everything you read”. Now it appears that we can’t believe everything we read, see and hear.

So why are brands using subterfuge marketing to sell to us? Basically, it’s because we don’t trust or like advertising anymore. According to research, the average Briton is bombarded by 3,000 marketing messages a day and fewer than 15 per cent of British adults trust adverts. As a result, brands and their agencies have had to employ new tactics to reach their target audiences.    

Today it’s all about targeting, infiltrating and influencing conversations, whether it’s on the train, via email or using one of the many social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Bebo etc. Rather than shouting at consumers, it’s about engaging with them.

Employing actors to pose as real consumers may be the new thing but marketers having been using stealth and subversive marketing tactics for years. Take for example viral emails, product placement and celebrity endorsements. All are designed to lull the consumer into a false sense of reality.

And now, with the advent of social media, that reality has become even more blurry.

Twitter is a good example. Does John Smith really love Starbucks’ tall, extra shot, whipped cream, skinny, vanilla, soya latte that much, or is he being paid to say he does? Does Jim456 really think his new Nike trainers are like “walking on air”? Maybe, but I guess we’ll never really know.

What we do know is that consumers are becoming increasingly attuned to and sceptical of marketing messages. The challenge for brands and marketing agencies is coming up with new ways of influencing their audiences. For consumers, it’s deciding who to trust and who to believe.

So the next time you buy a book, think back to the last time you were on the train. Your decision may have been influenced by a couple of actors. 

ENDS

The very polished Nick Axford, head of the firm’s EMEA research team, said there is cause for optimism, as the investment market is picking up.

Apparently, retail property is being highly sought after across Europe, with shopping centres topping the list. Girls, just imagine hubby coming home and saying: “Darling, I’ve bought you a shopping centre”. Sigh.

Nick also said that sentiment at MIPIM this year had improved. Of course, that is anecdotal, rather than based on the in depth analysis and professional insight of CBRE’s research team, but it is a view I’ve found echoed elsewhere.

On the Malcolm Hollis yacht this evening, the building consultancy’s chairman John Woodman said much the same, as did their guests from Wardell Armstrong.

Things must be good in Nottingham too, judging by the size of their yacht in the next mooring.

Birmingham has come in for a lot of stick in the past for its MIPIM expenditure. Although admittedly I’ve not been in the bunker and seen our city’s stand at first hand, I have to say our presence seems low key in comparison to others.

While Manchester – with their brazen banner and balcony cafe overlooking the entrance to the exhibition – and Nottingham have gone for the “my marketing budget’s considerably bigger than yours” approach, others, like Coventry, have adopted guerrilla tactics, with posters outside their apartment and the Carlton hotel.

It’s hard to judge which strategy is best – and anyway, they say half of any marketing spend is wasted, you just don’t know which half.  Next year, maybe Birmingham should stop beating itself up, ditch that Quaker mentality and hire a yacht. Let’s get some of that swagger that Professor Parkinson said we lacked.

Ran into Gary Taylor of Argent (running late for the Leader’s dinner!) and Nick Payne of Masshouse fame on the Croisette. Before you get excited and smell a JV in the offing, they weren’t together.

Also caught a glimpse of Clive Dutton, still looking dapper.

Thursday’s big event, at least for the Brum contingent, is lunch on the beach. Apparently they’ve ditched the baltis this year. Read all about it tomorrow.

The trendy furniture chain has been using online search words (known as hashtags) linked to the protests in Iran to lure large numbers of people into its Twitter feed.Habitat used misleading hashtags to promote its spring collection, which meant that people who wanted to find out about the violent mass protests in Tehran were presented with posts about discount sofas and the Habitat gift card.

 Other inappropriate hashtags the company used included ‘iPhone’ and ‘Apple’.

Along with the protest in Iran, these have been some of the most widely discussed topics on Twitter and it looks as if Habitat had hoped to piggyback on the strength of interest in these subjects.

After all, it’s unlikely that anybody is going to search or hashtag ‘Habitatspringcollection’ on Twitter but even so, this misguided use of social media is unhelpful at best and dangerous at worst, particularly as the site has become an essential communications tool for the Iranian opposition movement.

Whatever happened to marketers targeting their audience? Surely it would have been far better for Habitat to hashtag phrases like ‘newhome’ ‘movinghouse’ and ‘interiordesign’.

Sending out tweets about furniture to people embroiled in a passionate political debate seems as absurd as sending a press release about the launch of a new alcopop to the editors of Horse and Hound, and frankly is no better than the thousands of Viagra emails we’re all spammed with on a daily basis.

Many companies, even those with in house or agency PR and marketing experts on hand, seem to be so desperate to exploit social media that they haven’t bothered to work out the best ways to use it, or to consider the preferences, or etiquette if you like, of existing users.

No self-respecting PR would expect a journalist to open his emails if he continually bombarded him with stories that weren’t relevant to the publication, and yet in the Twittersphere, they seem to think that persistent blanket messaging is the way to go.   

Yes, there is the potential to reach huge global audiences but exercising a little caution and restraint will ultimately help get your message further than mindless spamming.

Protesters turn their attention to other matters thanks to Habitat's Twitter campaign