WORD of Mouth (WOM) occurs naturally. In fact it is how marketing really started and even till today people share stories about brands and their experience of those brands with each other every day. Whether WOM works is not in question. The challenge is to ensure that it is working for your brand and not against it.
Word of mouth marketing enlists an amazing array of techniques to get people talking. Whatever the ultimate goal of a marketing initiative, there’s sure to be a word of mouth practice that fits. Research from leading companies reveals the mindset of today’s consumers: 76% don’t believe that companies tell the truth in advertisements. 68% trust other people “like themselves”, up from 22% in 2003.
As Seth Godin, American author of business books, entrepreneur and agent of change, predicts, “90% of your sales will come from word of mouth or digital promotion by 2011.”
As word of mouth becomes an ever more important component of marketing, the scales are tipping. Undersell, overdeliver. It’s the strategy that works in the long run. Every marketer has a choice; to make the first interaction the best of the experience, or the worst.
Word of Mouth Marketing in Malaysia
Bringing WOM marketing to Malaysia is Vocanic Pte Ltd, a Singapore based company. Vocanic’s definition of word of mouth marketing is that it is marketing activities designed specifically to increase the amount of positive recommendation for your brand. Vocanic started five years ago which now makes them one of the most experienced teams in the region.
Vocanic’s principal is based on the belief that there is nothing more powerful for your brand than personal recommendation from one friend to another. One of the techniques employed by Vocanic, with supporting software platform, is to listen to the customer. Vocanic and other word-of-mouthers believe that there exists an unmet need among consumers to feel that their opinions are valued by the brands that matter to them.
Vocanic are a team of 10 people who:
•Develop both the overall strategies and individual campaign ideas.
•Develop the online web based software technology needed to run projects at the scales of 100s or 1000s of people at a time.
•Work with clients and partners to execute the campaigns
A case study of Vocanic’s WOM marketing
Vocanic developed a unique and cost-effective launch campaign by identifying travel Influencers – the people whose travel recommendations are more powerful than others – and created an engagement plan to capture the voice of the customers and initiate an Influencer-driven WOM campaign.
The launch campaign was done for Anantara Resorts. Vocanic created the Anantara Insiders program (www.anantaraonline.com) to present the new property. Over 300 couples and families were identified as travel Influencers using Vocanic’s proprietary Groundswell™ platform. Characteristics of these Influencers included a charismatic personality, persuasive communication style and an unusually large social network.
Anantara and Vocanic segmented the Influencers and offered each group an exclusive experience at the new resort. The most powerful Influencers were given the most attractive offers while the not so powerful influencers, given the lesser but still attractive offers. The rationale is that these people are likely to share their experiences with friends and trigger the word of mouth media that Vocanic hopes for.
When checking out, people were asked to provide feedback via laptops in the hotel lobby. The laptops leveraged Vocanic’s proprietary ‘Voice of the Customer’ platform, which uniquely enables people to feed suggestions to the resorts server. An important part of the initiative was to elicit candid feedback from guests, so as to make informed adjustments – to ensure the resort would earn recommendations from them in the future. Vocanic and Anantara made it easy for guests to share their experiences and recommend the resort to friend by presenting guests with Anantara-branded thumb drive containing personal photographs of their stay to share with friends. They Influencers were also given ‘Golden Key Cards’ containing a special URL and a unique token that unlocks an attractive offer for them to pass to their friends.
The results? Travel enthusiasts occupied rooms that would have likely been empty just a few days after opening. Also, over 50 new ideas for improving the resort had been submitted thus far and a number of the top-ranking suggestions have already been implemented.
The effectiveness of WOM marketing
Ian McKee CEO of Vocanic says, “We see it as media. Imagine the voices of thousands of your customers recommending your brand to their friends. It can create awareness, change perceptions and drive trial.”
Indeed one of the pillars of success for Barrack Obama’s presidential campaign was that at mass scale they activated their supporters to become advocates, raising money, persuading their friends and getting people out to vote, all by means of word of mouth.
It is conventional wisdom among the leading edge marketers that is driving word of mouth advocacy – inspiring people to talk about products and brands to their friends, family and colleagues – is critical to success today. The reasons are both quantitative and qualitative. Consumers continually cite word of mouth recommendation as top influence on purchase decisions. They consistently say it is more trustworthy than other forms of communication. They also say it’s twice as valuable as traditional marketing, according to the Keller Fay Group, a market research firm focused on word of mouth. Marketers also instinctively recognise that brand relationships are emotional as well as intellectual and that inspiring people to advocacy accounts for more and cost less.
Key Findings on WOM marketing:
a)Word of mouth recommendation is the number one purchase influencer for business decision makers.
b)Other influences that come in below word of mouth are sales force,events/conferences, tradeshows and the Internet.
c)Word of Mouth has twice the influence of advertising, press converge and direct mail/email.
d)Executive talk 18% more and about 32% more brands than typical consumers.
e)75% of executive word of mouth happens face to face.
f)78% of executive word of mouth is based on personal experience.
g)90% of word of mouth still functions offline, with 72% coming from person to person encounters while 18% coming by phone.
WOM in the digital age
Not so long ago, before the Internet was popularised, paid advertising was the only way to roll. Beginning in 1989, the birth of the World Wide Web began its snowball effect, increasing from a massive 11.5 billion documents online in 1999 to 25.12 billion documents in 2009. This simply illustrates a hike in user awareness and only means to lie exposed amidst the subtext; digital is very much a part of our future. And with emerging online social tools such as Facebook and Twitter, it would be safe to claim that digital is the latest tool in the shift toward word of mouth marketing.
So how does word of mouth marketing relate to social media & social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Plurk?
Well, people use social networking to connect with their online buddies – to share photographs, videos and the occasional witty quip. Since brands and the experience of brands is such a big part of our lives, inevitably people will share stories of their brand experiences as well. Facebook alone is approaching 400 million users which means word of mouth marketing is then apparent in social media. The Blogsphere is another Internet tool used widely by individuals, groups and companies to communicate with the community in a casual and interactive way. Done correctly, word of mouth marketing will cause an increase in recommendation both offline (face to face) and increasingly online.
Is viral marketing the same as word of mouth?
Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that’s it. It amplifies the marketing action and then fades, usually quickly. A lousy flight on United Airlines is word of mouth. A great meal at Momofuku is word of mouth.
Viral marketing is a compounding function. A marketer does something and then a consumer tells five or ten people. Then then they tell five or ten people. And it repeats. And grows and grows. Like a virus spreading through a population. The marketer doesn’t have to actually do anything else. They can help by making it easier for the word to spread, but in the classic examples, the marketer is out of the loop. The Mona Lisa is an ideavirus.
This distinction is vital. For one thing, it means that constant harassment of the population doesn’t increase the chances of something becoming viral. It means that most organisations should realise that they have a better chance with word of mouth (more likely to occur, more manageable, more flexible) and focus on that.
Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA)
The importance of WOMMA’s role can be seen as Fortune 500 firm, Dupont has officially sanctioned the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) Code of Ethics, effectively enforcing it in all areas of its business structure, including sales and marketing employees and vendors. This act was described as a milestone in consumer protection and privacy, and not to mention nailing the door on the, once much debated deliberation on mouth to mouth marketing tactics. Dupont added to this by endorsing all word of mouth marketing service providers that adhere to the WOMMA’s code of ethics, effectively becoming the first major marketer to screen vendors for word of mouth ethics.
“By ensuring that everyone acting on behalf of the company subscribes to the highest ethical standards in their dealings with the public, DuPont has issued a call to U.S. businesses to follow its path,” commented WOMMA CEO Andy Sernovitz.
“DuPont’s action sends an important message: Honest word of mouth marketing firms will be getting more business, and deceptive stealth marketers will find it impossible to find customers,” Sernovitz continued.
Gary Spangler, DuPont’s representative to WOMMA, said, “DuPont’s proactive adoption of this ethics code is a leading example of self-regulation in this emerging field.”
At the heart of the WOMMA Ethics Code is Honesty ROI: Honest disclosure of Relationship, Opinion and Identity. This set of allegory informs both consumers and marketers inquire about a definitive relationship, one that would allow all parties their own honest opinions and at the same time, everyone discloses their identity.
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By Andrea Mathew and Jonathan Lim