Back Into the Future: Word of Mouth - Turbo Charged

What could be more everyday than word of mouth? We all have a mouth and most of us use it often too much, to our own detriment (especially marketers). Therefore, it long escaped the attention of marketing experts, how important the word-of-mouth-share was in buying decisions.

You could measure the significance between industries and between products, but in most cases word of mouth (WOM) contributes 90% or more to the final decision in a purchase process.

Exceptions apply for new product trials, but WOM catches up with that pretty fast. How often have you asked friends to give you their take on the latest movie? Was your decision impacted? I bet.

This did nothing to bolster the self confidence of marketers, quite the contrary. Therefore some clever marketing guys invented the concept of "Word-of-Mouth"-Marketing, also known as "Viral Marketing", "Buzz Marketing" or similar.

However, this was just a creative way to acknowledge that customers have their own darn mind, when it comes to making buying decisions. And then these thankless consumers also talk to their friends about it (particuarly if they did not like the product). And it does not matter a lot what the product manager concocted with his ad agency (or how much that had cost).

In terms of customer retention and loyalty it is well researched that customers talk with each other about staying or leaving with companies. Really great experiences are talked about as well, alright, but really interesting are the lousy encounters. Such stories are spread a dozen times more and damage the reputation of a brand pretty fast.

Slowly, marketing and media managers meekly admit to their big moneyed clients that despite all the advertising, a bad product will not become better through them - or sell more. Blame it all to the good ol´word of mouth.

Web 2.0 - The turbo charger

Now enter Web 2.0 and the word of mouth factor multiplies dramatically. Not only will my family and friends listen to me, no: even stranger heed my two cents. This we will call Word of Mouth - turbo charged.

The turbo as we know it now at engines was invented in 1905 by a Swiss, here. In marketing we know the Web 2.0 and I would suggest to apply the analogy of Word of Mouth - turbo charged to it.

The Web 2.0 world puts the charger on WOM with social media, user generated content, customized online ordering, crowdsourcing, semantic web, etc ..... what the heck else will they cram into the Internet anyway?

The WOM turbo will be the default, normal, run-of-the-mill marketing. Bad news for ad agencies, but guys - the times they are a-changin´.

What really happened is the end of classical mass marketing, which was the actual aberration. It is abnormal to produce millions of the same goods and then expect that people - who are endlessly different and vain on top of that - will buy it.

This was just possible in times of scarcity and when people were still fascinated with television. But, these times are long gone and with new customization, database and mobile technology will never return.

Therefore we are back to the normal world: I want mine, and that is not like yours. And I tell my story, which is mine and not like yours.

And so we all can feel we are different and unique: a free, individual person. Thanks God. And I will tell everyone who wants to hear it.....

P.S.: And, by the way, you cannot control word of mouth. And don´t even try with WOM turbo.

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Web 2.0 and Other Hypes

Web 2.0 slowly made it´s way to the executive suite. The definition you find in Wikipedia.

Then I get asked, what the impact of Web 2.0 is having on the practice of marketing. My first answer is: practically very little, with exceptions. In my experience only a few industries have had any real exposure to the Web 2.0 trend of net collaboration, interactivity and free online sharing.

That does not mean that it had not had a serious impact for selected industries with easy online sharing, like

• music industry (file sharing, even if illegal)
  
• the electronics and travel retailers (exchange of price data)
  
• internet advertising (millions of little ads)
• social platforms, like youtube.com (don´t know what business, if any, that is...)
  

However, in practice, for most industries, the topic of Web 2.0 is so far out of their world that many do not even know what it means. Practically oriented marketers and leaders are more concerned with established metrics and issues that keep them more than busy right now.

I do not judge either side, the progressives nor the laggards, as each industry very much follows it´s own logic and development for a reason. However, more interesting would be those twilight places where an outsider enters the fray with a new business model based on Web 2.0 principles. I have not seen to many of such, for suggestions I am open.

In fact, most of the Web 2.0 players "play" in their own little world, while the rest of the "real" world only very slowly adopts these scary new concepts of UGC (user generated content), blogs, wikis and semantic web .... Marketing inertia is here to stay and especially now in uncertain times, many will be loath to experiment with unproven marketing tools.

It will be interesting to observe over the next years how such innovations are either integrated in existing marketing practices or overturn the existing order. The latter would have happened already or would it not?

So let us look out for the Web 2.0 impact, before we end up at Web 11.0 or so. In the meantime there are many quite profitable applications for early adopters to capture with Web 2.0. This blog is just one.