What is word of mouth?
From the moment we wake up, to the moment we sleep, we are constantly being bombarded with messages trying to convince us of the best ways to spend our time and money. This creates a feeling of 'information anxiety', with many of us now unsure of who to trust and what to believe. So what do we do? We turn to our friends and ask, "What do you recommend?" In fact, we are turning to friends for advice on new products and services 5 times more often than advertising, and we are turning to them more often - - 92% of the time, today, versus 67% of the time in 1977.
The internet plays an important role in the distribution of information that gets talked about, but it is not where advocacy is transferred. Rather, 71% of advocacy is transferred face-to-face, 21% via telephone and 1% email. Perhaps this is because you will only recommend something if you are prepared to put your reputation on the line. And this is still best done person-to-person.
What's new about that? Word of mouth has always existed...
The difference, now, is that brands such as P&G, Masterfoods and GSK are using marketing investment to generate more word of mouth, faster and better. This has led to the emergence of a practice called word of mouth marketing (WOMM). Many brands now deliver campaigns that are specifically designed to generate advocacy - - for everything from snack food to home refurbishment. And these campaigns are fundamentally different from traditional campaigns designed to create awareness of a message. A WOMM campaign targets an influencer, delivers content that friends and colleagues will talk about, and introduces an accelerator to give these influencers a reason to speak to more people, more often, more persuasively.
- Influencer. In any category, about 15% of the users will be influencers. The other 85% turn to these individuals for information about the category. Influencers are confident when advocating about their specialist category. They like to dig for information, make their own mind up, watch less TV, read more books, etc. And they are networked. They tend to speak more regularly with a larger number of people, send more emails, make more telephone calls, etc.
- Content. There is a difference between the messages we are prepared to receive in advertising and the messages we are prepared to talk about with our friends. For L'Oreal, customers were not prepared to talk with each other about the benefits of Vitamin B12 in hair colouring. However, they were interested in speaking with each other about what their hair would look like in a specific colour. This led to the development of a colour swatch where women could pull a tuft of their hair through a small opening and ask their friends, "Does my hair look good in this colour?"
- Accelerator. Speed up the interaction between influencer and content, then you speed up the dispersion and improve the quality of word of mouth. This can be through delivery of an exclusive "first2taste' party pack for Pringles or reporting back to BzzAgent on your opinion of a new coffee machine from Nescafe, as well as the conversations you've had about it. What is critical, here, is that influencers are free to interact with the product, rate it, and talk about - - positively and negatively.
Does it work?
A WOMM campaign for pet food increased sales by 1,156%. A WOMM campaign for home refurbishment delivered a return on investment of 937:1. There are plenty of anecdotes that demonstrate how well WOMM is working. A recent study by Dr. Walter Carl of Northeastern sheds some light onto why. He found that one unit of advocacy results in, on average, 62 conversations. In other words, target 1,000 influencers with a campaign and you will generate 62,000 conversations about your product or service. There are few media that can claim such an amplification rate.
Perhaps the best indicator of how well WOMM is working is the marketing budget that is pouring in behind this practice - - particularly in the US. The WOMM industry was worth $1.3bn in the US in 2007 (PQ Media). And it's beginning to take off over here. There is a vibrant WOMM industry emerging in the UK, with many of the leading practitioners coming together to form WOM UK, the word of mouth marketing association in the UK. (See www.womuk.org for more information.)
