It’s no secret, folks! My admiration for Jack Trout and his works are evident enough in the way I go about using his ideas to propagate marketing concepts during work and in my writings on my blog. Here’s the thing: I challenge anyone who speaks about ‘viral’ marketing. To me viral marketing is an ‘X’ factor of luck or a windfall effect that comes through for reasons that people find hard to comprehend. It is also short-term and not sustaining.
The word-of-mouth (WOM) effect is something that makes me feel the same way. Jack Trout, some years ago, wrote an article on WOM in Forbes about how this word-of-mouth marketing phenomenon is getting out of hand.
He wrote about how things were getting a little out of hand because there was a Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association called WOMMA. And lots of noise was made about this.
Funnily, he also mentioned the different names of WOM marketing: buzz marketing, viral marketing, community marketing, grassroots marketing, evangelist marketing, product seeding, influencer marketing, cause marketing, conversation creation, brand blogging and referral programs.
He debunks the newness of the concept and states that the parallel, back in the day, was early adopters. It sounds simple enough to me. Within a typical product life cycle, early adopters accept a product and propagate its benefits to people within their social circles and as a results, more people try it enough to get the product to move into the growth phase of its life cycle. No such scientific basis exists for WOM marketing.
As Mr. Trout says, today, people have many more ways to communicate. With digital communications, online chatter far surpasses the direct person-to-person communication, with the exception of clearly knowing the person with whom you are chatting. the problem is that too much ease of communication has led to conversations en masse with the result that noise levels have been raised to mind boggling levels. Mr. Trout likes that.
But, he asks a sensible question. How many people really want to chat about a product? In online forums, especially the popular ones like Facebook and Twitter, how many people talk about mass marketed products like toothpaste or toilet paper? And, if the product’s a luxury product like the Audi TT, fewer people chat about them as they want to be seen driving up in one. He does give some allowances to specialty clubs like Harley Davidson motorcycle and states that members of those clubs talk about those specialized products only. They don’t need buzz. I would add that today some brands have clubs build around them but, it’s more from a ‘servicing’ standpoint rather than trying to penetrate a market with a new product. Think JetBlue or H&R Block on Twitter or Whole Foods on both Twitter and Facebook. There are also communities centered around religion like Catholic Relief Services or even automobiles like the Ford page on Facebook. But, I seriously doubt if any of these companies have a serious social media strategy on how to use their fan bases to increase sales.
Mr. Trout speaks about the Segway scooter and the negative buzz it received. “Funny looking or dangerous on sidewalks” is not what you want to hear. He rightly states that negative buzz can kill off a product if it is not the right one. The Pontiac G6 giveaway on Oprah got a lot of buzz but sales never really took off. The product lacked intrinsic characteristics like trust, faith, reliability & quality - a problem that most American auto brands face except Ford, who upped their game. Sometimes, buzz can be positive though, like the buzz on Google’s Chrome bowser (see graphic) or even Google Buzz. In any case, Mr. Trout’s super advice on this one: You’ve got to have a product or service people want to talk about in a positive way, and there aren’t many of these around.
Jack Trout continues on the bad part of WOM marketing. There’s no way to control that word-of-mouth. Does a brand manager really want to give up control of the promotional piece of the marketing mix and and let consumers take over? In the WOM sphere, all people do is talk. Hopefully, they’ll talk positively about your product. But, they;re not a product manager who is responsible for getting product sold. If someone develops a positioning strategy for their product, he/she wants to see that message delivered. Buzz, as he says, will get you social mentions. Nothing more. Nobody will check in with the brand manager in advance on what to say.
In conclusion, WOM marketing is just another piece of an overall marketing strategy. If the social media piece of your strategy is complemented by essential marketing elements like TV ad campaigns, radio campaigns, DM, PPC, email marketing, POS promotions, then it can be more successful in helping you achieve your product penetration goals. Otherwise, it will just be ‘conversations’ that you can put a dollar value to and look stupid when asked to explain it.
