The other day, Shawn Blanc had an outstanding post titled You Can’t Buy Word of Mouth.
In the post, Shawn outlined how marketing has changed dramatically from driving people from the days of expecting someone to discover your product and just start using it based on the ad you ran. Marketing and advertising is now, according to Shawn, not just about people using your products. It is about them discovering, trying, delighting in using your products and then evangelising about them. That evangelism is word of mouth and is the most efficient, successful form of marketing. It’s also one of the toughest to achieve and sustain because it means a shift in mindset for all parts of a company. It takes longer, is more ambiguous and takes the control that companies thought they had (but really didn’t) and puts it in the hands of the customer.
What is good marketing?
According to Shawn:
Good marketing may get people in the door the first time, but it’s good product development that gets them in the door the second time and the third time.
That definition means that marketing is about more than advertising. As Shawn points out:
There was a time when advertising was glamorous and brands were built 30 seconds at a time. In those days all you had to do to build your customer base was buy enough television and radio commercials. Getting a new customer was about as easy as getting their attention. Brand loyalty was a two step process: Discovery then Use.
Marketing is no longer about just making some catchy ads and waiting for business to stumble in the door. Marketing today needs to be about the experience of dealing with a company…all the way through the process. This is how brands are built now. Every single interaction a person has with your company is marketing. Everything from product design to after sale interaction. They all go to building your brand because the tools you are using to tell people about how great your company is (i.e. social media) are the same tools that people will use to tell their friends how horrible you are if they have a negative experience with you.
And they’ll be believed and trusted much more than you will.
Let’s just do some viral marketing
Easy there, big shooter.
Today, everyone wants to “go viral.” It’s amazing how, with the growth of the internet and social technologies, some usually smart business people can be so dumb to think that they can force people to spread their message just by wanting it or even paying for it. Like Scott Stratten says, “People spread awesome.”
Shawn addresses this in his post and points to one of the few ways you may be able to help fuel word of mouth.
And so, companies want their customers to tell their friends about the product. But try as you may, you can’t force people to talk about your product, which means that the next best thing is to try and get people to at least use it.
In theory, that’s great. “I’ll let people try out my product and they’ll tell all their friends about it. The money will come flowing in!”
This step is why I say that word of mouth marketing is one of the toughest forms of marketing. With the great tools available today like Twitter, Facebook and others, it seems logical that word of mouth would be easier because it’s easier for people to spread your message. Unfortunately, it’s focusing on the tools that gets so many marketers and brands in trouble. They look at the tools and forget to get the framework set up before using the tools. They forget that they need to stand for something and stand out before putting “tweet 1″ out there.
Shawn sums it up by saying:
But if you step back and look at the successful companies that have grown, you’ll see that their success lies primarily in great product development that leads to natural evangelism.
That’s the key and why word of mouth is so tough. You have to build a product/service/whatever that is so great (or awesome, as Stratten would say) that people can’t help but tell other people about it. No matter how much you want it, they have to love it in order for it to spread.
Evidence that buying word of mouth doesn’t work
Between writing this post and posting it, a glaring example proving that you can’t buy word of mouth came up.
On Google Plus, both +Thomas Hawk and +Trey Ratcliff posted that they had received letters from the camera lens manufacturer Tamron offering to pay them to write three posts on each of their highly trafficked blogs.
If you read Thomas’s post or Trey’s, you’ll see that trying to buy word of mouth not only doesn’t work, but often can result in the exact opposite of your desired effect. Your hope of getting some positive word of mouth ends up getting negative sentiment spread far and wide.
Word of mouth is hard but worthwhile work
Ultimately, the best word of mouth just happens. There are ways a company can help it along, but I think they’d be better served by just making great stuff, delighting their customers and making it easy for them to spread the message.
If your goal is to delight everyone that comes in contact with your company, rather than to get them to do something for you (like tell their friends), the word of mouth will take care of itself.
Photo credit: L.Bo
