Talk is cheap. Gossip is priceless. And while manipulated talk can be useful if you’re selling a film or a novelty that doesn’t need any staying power, it’s practically worthless if you’re hoping to build a brand.
Yet Word-of-Mouth (WOM) Marketing has become all the rage, with “water- cooler talk” becoming a barometer companies use to judge the success of their marketing and advertising campaigns. What were our numbers yesterday? How can we improve them today? If we can’t meet the short-term goals, who cares about the future? Unfortunately, these companies haven’t stopped to consider how driving short-term numbers may be killing their opportunity for long-term success.
Word-of-mouth is like any other form of media. Television is favored for its combination of sight and sound. Billboards are revered for their stopping power, print for its permanency. All forms of media, including word-of-mouth, disseminate information. Word-of-mouth is different from all other forms of media, however, because it is owned by the consumer. They control its content.
Some word-of-mouth marketers claim you benefit from word-of-mouth during specific windows of opportunity. That’s nonsense. Promotions and events have windows; brands have permanence. As long as consumers are benefiting from a relevant experience with the brand, they will talk. Consumers don’t need to be given a marketing cue card; they need an environment that allows them to draw their own conclusions and to define their own experience.
The problem with modern marketing is its overwhelming urge to quantify everything. If it can be measured, you can charge for it, and yes, size does matter: the bigger the measurable impact, the larger the monetary compensation for generating the result. The newest playground for metric maniacs is word-of-mouth marketing. The Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association declared in 2005 that it was now using word-of-mouth units to measure the effect of word-of-mouth on ROI. This is further proof that, to its own detriment, marketing has evolved into an industry more focused on making short-term money than on making long-term sense.
Numerous books on poker have been written to teach players the best ways to behave in certain situations, based on available statistics. However, watch any game and you’ll see that even experts stray from these rules. Why? Because the players in the game aren’t playing statistics, they’re playing other people. The best way to play isn’t always revealed by statistics.
Statistics reveal a glimpse of where people are, but they don’t tell you where people are going or how they will get there. It’s one thing to know what movies are making the most money, but that’s not the same as predicting which ones are going to make the most money. If someone could forecast that, the movie studios would be a lot happier.
Look at what’s happening: Big brands are paying big money to create “buzz” about their products. These companies then insist they don’t pay people to talk, which technically is true—they only give their “buzz” agents free products, coupons, and “points” if they do their homework and report back to the mother ship.
What do you think happens when the buzz campaign ends? Do you really think consumers keep yakking about a product when the incentive to do so disappears? Worse yet, the next product sample shows up in the mail and they’re asked to buzz on a new client’s behalf. That’s not pure word-of-mouth. It’s promotion attempting to use word-of-mouth as a media vehicle, which is no different than using radio, television, or direct mail. Ultimately, it runs into a dead end and is enormously risky for companies wanting to build lasting brands.
Promoting products is a totally different discipline than creating brands. True word-of-mouth is totally different than word-of-mouth marketing. Marketers are in control of communicating a message, but consumers are in control of building brands.
So pick your poison. If you want to sell product in the short term and aren’t worried about building a brand, if you’ve exhausted every other medium known to mankind, pick up the phone and call any of the self-proclaimed word-of-mouth marketers and buzz practitioners. They’ve got the metrics on their side.
But be cautioned: Once you pollute the word-of-mouth pipeline, there’s no turning back. If you’re marketing movies, selling novelties or liquidating books, have at it—these things are not likely to become brands and you will not need the power of word-of-mouth in its purest form. If you are relying on the consumer to turn you into a brand that is embraced by a legion of loyal evangelists, however, don’t pollute the best marketing tool ever to roam God’s green earth.
The above is an excerpt from Why We Talk: The Truth Behind Word-of-Mouth. (c) 2007 by Bolivar J. Bueno.
