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Archive for the ‘brand advocacy’ Category

Word-of-mouth is easier said than done

October 10, 2011

Restaurants and pubs know they live and die by the word of mouth they create from the experiences their customers have with their establishments. Those that get it right build empires from their riches. Unlocking the secret to his success and, perhaps, the building of his empire Justin Hemmes tells us how he created word-of-mouth success for his latest venture. Justin says there are four pillars to building word of mouth:

Get the product right. Probably the most important part of any word-of-mouth campaign is having something that is worth talking about or creating something that is worth talking about
Know your audience and make them your advocates. Justin knew his audience was going to be the local people living in the area so he made them his VIPs and targeted them for the launch, not some media VIP launch that might get some column inches but few ongoing sales.
Use social media to amplify their experience. Justin made time-lapse videos of his fit-out and invited his community to check it out and pass on.
Finally, make it personal. For Justin this mean having himself and his staff out engaging with the community and bringing the brand to life. I think this means showing that you care that the management of the company cares about their customers and there is no better way to do this than to talk to them, directly.

Justin has lots of great points which could help brands be more innovative about how they build word of mouth. It’s not just restaurants and bars that live or die by word of mouth anymore, but all brands.

Tags:Justin Hemmes
Posted in Authenticity, brand advocacy, Community, word of mouth | Leave a Comment »

Not much sizzle in The Grill Team’s “WOM” strategy

June 1, 2011

Dana Ingster

I’m an avid radio flicker in the mornings, in constant search of music. But if I’m going to settle on any talk, I surprisingly find myself being able to tolerate Triple M’s breakfast show, the Grill Team despite not being a middle-aged sport-loving bloke.

They’ve just launched a new promotion for the show that’s been getting on my nerves more and more the past few days. The competition goes something like this:

Sign up to the promotion via the website;
Send an email to as many friends as possible telling them that Matty Johns has joined the team;
The person who “tells” the most people wins a ticket to their toga party.

What’s wrong with this?

Well, they’re promoting this as “word of mouth”; they want their listeners to spread the word about Matty Johns.

I think the competition might be “word of mouth” in a very loose sense, but it’s definitely not word-of-mouth marketing. This is at best a transaction, at worst, bribery. If I really wanted to attend the toga party, I would send the email to everyone I know, whether they care about Matty Johns or not. Most of them would probably delete it straight away and be irritated by my spam.

If I was in Triple M’s marketing team, I’d find some other way to award the tickets to worthy contenders (sports knowledge quizzes, Grill Team quizzes, random prize draw, there are lots of options). Then give the winners a great experience at the party and encourage (not bribe or insist) that they tell their friends. The difference? Firstly, they have something to actually talk about; a great night out in honour of Matty Johns joining the Grill Team, some fun stories about the night and what good blokes the team are (hopefully). Secondly though, they will tell the people for whom it’s relevant; they’ll tell those people who care and who will be interested in the Matty Johns news.

Take the transaction out. Insert a great brand experience, and watch the word travel. Find a way to invite influencers to the party, and then you’ll really see it go gangbusters!

What do you think? What would you do to spread the word?

Tags:competitions
Posted in Authenticity, brand advocacy, Community, Social media | Leave a Comment »

Your fans are your best asset

May 26, 2011

Scott Taylor

This case study of Lady Gaga’s album launch on Mashable

(yes, Lady Gaga – don’t be a hater) sums up effective marketing perfectly in one simple point:

“Use your fans as your best marketing asset. Encourage and remind them to tell your story and never forget to thank them along the way.”

Though calling your fans a “marketing asset” seems a bit ironic in the context of this sentence.

Scott (Little Monster for a day)

PS. The entire article is a pretty fascinating look at Lady Gaga’s entire “social marketing“ (what kind of marketing isn’t social?) strategy. It’s extensive and obviously effective to say the least.

Update as of 20 minutes after writing the above:

Just to complicate matters (nothing’s ever simple is it?), Adele, the second biggest pop-star in the world right now, is the complete counterpoint to the Gaga-marketing machine – as this article shows:

“Despite huge commercial offers, she refuses to ‘sell out’ and despises artists who exploit their fans for financial gain…

She restricts interviews and avoids Lady Gaga-style ubiquity. ‘I don’t want to be in everyone’s face. I’m a big music fan and I get really pissed off when it gets like that … and I don’t want people to get like that with me.’”

So how have two seemingly polar opposite marketing strategies worked so effectively? In my humble little opinion it’s down to product.

Think of what would happen if you swapped the strategies of both artists. Lady Gaga would probably disappear into cult obscurity (though for mine this would make her eccentricity seem more genuine – perhaps a bit like Fever Ray). Whilst Adele would simply come across as a bizarre, money driven, sell out, as she readily points out.

Regardless, both Adele and Gaga, while going about it in fundamentally different ways, strictly follow the original point:

“Use your fans as your best marketing asset. Encourage and remind them to tell your story and never forget to thank them along the way”.

Tags:Adele, fans, Lady Gaga, music
Posted in Authenticity, brand advocacy, Influencers, marketing, Social media, word of mouth | Leave a Comment »

Customers as advocates

May 20, 2011

Dana Ingster

This article makes four key points which I couldn’t agree with more. I thought I’d share these with you:

Brands need to not only recognise, but invest in the influential power of their customers. Much like Sharyn mentioned in her five predictions for WOM in 2011.
Social commerce is “about generating word-of-moth and user-generated content to influence people in their purchasing decisions”.
Recommendations from buyers’ peers have become more influential that recommendations from experts or review sites.
And finally, Chris Byrne cites our friend Malcolm Gladwell by re-iterating what most of us intuitively know; through the law of the influential few, “word of mouth can turn brands or products into social epidemics”.

Posted in brand advocacy, Influencers, word of mouth | Leave a Comment »

Growing WOM the organic way – it’s all about the message

May 2, 2011

Katie Palmer

I was sitting on a plane recently, flipping through an in-flight magazine when an answer to one of those ‘these are my favourite things/things that inspire me/things I can’t live without’ Q&As struck me (well, provided me with an idea for this blog post at least…) The interview was with Jefferson Hack and while he’s widely regarded from an industry perspective as pioneering “new approaches in journalism, film, photography, and new digital media” he is best known for being a fashionable Londoner and having a daughter with Kate Moss. When asked, given his diverse background, what is the medium of the moment, he replied “The message”.

It’s an interesting way to look at how we communicate with consumers today (interesting also that is flips Marshall Mcluhan’s “The medium is the message” theory on its head) and is evidenced in marketing by the rise of content creation, authentic testimonials and, of course, the proliferation of engaging brand ambassadors.

Even in 2009 when I attended the WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) conference in Las Vegas the statement of the conference for me was that it was imperative to “craft contagious content” in any communication you enter into.

If you can get the message right, you can achieve one side of the WOM coin; organic WOM. Organic word of mouth occurs when people have a great experience with a product or brand, have great customer service or feel engaged by communication.

When looking at the other side – amplified WOM – the message is still imperative to its success. While word-of-mouth marketing (amplified WOM) is all about finding the right people and motivating them to spread the word. That word and how it’s crafted is fundamental to the way the message travels through the market, and ultimately how people will engage with your brand.

Posted in Authenticity, brand advocacy, User-generated content, word of mouth | Leave a Comment »

Five predictions for word of mouth in 2011

December 18, 2010

Sharyn Smith

Is word of mouth (WOM) next year’s most talked about media? Well some would argue it already is. With this in mind, I’ve put together my five top trends for WOM in 2011.

Merry Christmas!

WOM will continue to grow

Yes, this seems obvious to us (and of course we are not biased at all…) but here are the facts: a recommendation from a friend impacts behaviour like no form of advertising can. McKinsey even quantified it this year to say that WOM is 50 times more likely to generate a purchase. Earned media, beyond having a Facebook page, will be a key focus for brands in 2011.

Harness influencers to co-create and launch new products

Technology companies have been doing it for a while with the mantra of: faster to market, and iterative change towards better products. As more pressure is placed upon companies to innovate quickly, they need to shrink their process and come up with new ways to ideate and develop great new products. They then need an accelerated launch plan in an increasinly cluttered market.

Finding ‘lead consumers’ as Eric Von Hippel puts it, or market influencers, is gaining traction as a way to achieve breakthrough insights from the people who are going to lead the trends; and then involving them as a key launch channel to market. Google probably have the most famous beta testing philosophy and other brands and industries are jumping onboard too.

Invest in customers

Companies are starting to cotton on to the fact that retention is the new acquisition. Actually Joseph Jaffe summed it up better in his book Flip the Funnel “If brands begun with the purchase, instead of ending with the purchase, they’d have a unique opportunity to grow the number of potential transactions (via increased basket sizes, repeat purchase and significantly, word-of-mouth referrals)”. Our Keller Fay research this year showed that most word of mouth about brands (82%) is from existing customers, demonstrating the importance of driving positive word of mouth from loyal, engaged customers.

Create employee advocacy

Many companies are starting to recognise their staff as a powerful word of mouth channel. Investing in this is a long-term proposition for a company, but one that will return on the investment 100 times over. Susan Gunelius says it well in her article: “So think about your own company and how much more powerful it could be if your employees truly believed in the brand promise. The word of mouth marketing true internal brand advocates could generate is exponential. It’s amazing all companies aren’t on the internal brand advocate train”.

Social CRM – social media

When we attended the WOMMA conference in Vegas this year the US was abuzz with another buzz word – Social CRM (sCRM). Put simply it means: harnessing the power of technology and the social media platforms to enhance relationships with customers, but also to using them to help one another. This is beyond the ‘listening’ most companies do now; or simply just monitoring the twitterverse and answering questions. It’s about sCRM working as a proactive marketing tool as well. The best award-winning example of this was Bestbuy’s Twelpforce and their branded community model http://forums.bestbuy.com/.

Posted in brand advocacy, Influencers, People power, Social media, word of mouth | 5 Comments »

Do as you say

November 18, 2010

Danielle Veldre – guest blog

"Deliver Danielle's groceries you must."

In the immortal words of Yoda: “Do or do not do, there is no try”.

This is one of my pet peeves, as it happens (it’s a growing list as I get older and crankier).

If you have no intention of doing something, or are unable, then don’t say you will.

It’s a simple rule for life and one which I think is key to good word of mouth for a business. Here is a news story which illustrates this point precisely.

I was grocery shopping in a big urban supermarket when all the power went out – it was a disconcerting experience, and one which reminded me how we take for granted a constant electricity supply for just about everything.

Lots of shoppers continued shopping, while staff moved quickly to cover the fridges, some people complained and others just left.

Clearly this wasn’t anyone’s fault, but I found myself with a trolley full of shopping, no way to pay for it, and whinging children on my hands.

The staff generally did a good job of trying to get everyone out of the shop in an orderly fashion, and I was very happy when one of the managers approached me offering to scan my groceries and deliver them to my house, then took my address and phone number.

Brilliant save. As I said, the power outage wasn’t the supermarket’s fault, and I wasn’t annoyed by that, but how they responded would make all the difference to how I felt about the situation.

I didn’t expect my groceries to be delivered, but it was a very welcome offer because I’d spent some time doing it, and I didn’t fancy having to do it again.

So I went home, and received a call later in the day from a staff member who said my groceries were ready to collect. I explained that a manager had offered to deliver them and the person on the phone said they’d follow up for me.

By 6pm, I hadn’t heard anything, so I called back to find out if I was going to get my groceries (as I had some items I needed that day). The person who took my call came back to me several times without seeming to know what was going on, the call was disconnected for some reason, and that’s the last I heard from them.

The moral of this story is that I went from a relaxed customer to an annoyed one within the space of half a day because someone didn’t do what they said they were going to do. If they were unable to deliver the groceries, they should never have suggested it in the first place, and at the very least, they could have called to let me know.

I’ve recounted this story to quite a few people now, and there could have been a much better WOM story for this supermarket brand if they’d just listened to Yoda.

Tags:customer service
Posted in brand advocacy, Influencers, word of mouth | Leave a Comment »

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Archive for the ‘brand advocacy’ Category

Word-of-mouth is easier said than done

Customers as advocates

Growing WOM the organic way – it’s all about the message

Do as you say

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