Word-of-mouth marketing (WOM) -- in which one consumer provides product or brand information to another -- has certainly been around for a long time. It's only in the age of TV, blogs, social networks, Twitter feeds and mobile texting that WOM marketing has become something of an art form
The trick is to give consumers accessing all of these media a reason to talk about a product and promote it themselves. Successful WOM marketing, according to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), is marketing that "empowers people to share their experiences. It's harnessing the voice of the customer for the good of the brand. And it's acknowledging that the unsatisfied customer is equally powerful."
Now is an especially hot moment for WOM marketing for three key reasons, says John Bell, president of the board of directors of WOMMA. First, people increasingly trust their peers more than they trust advertisers. Second, newly available social media tools mean more and more voices for WOM marketers to target. Third, and perhaps most important, social media tools make WOM measurable.
Take a look at a few examples of campaigns that did a great job of planting the seeds of conversation.
Company: Lenovo
Campaign: Voices of the Olympic Games
Computer-maker Lenovo armed 100 Olympic athletes from 25 countries with Lenovo laptops and Flip video cameras so they could blog about their experiences at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Participating athletes recorded their experiences prior to arriving in Beijing, during the games and from home after the games ended.
"The goal was to raise awareness about the new consumer platform and strengthen Lenovo's overall reputation," says Bell, whose company -- Ogilvy's 360º Digital Influence group -- worked on the campaign.
The campaign piggybacked on the popularity of a global event and relied on a variety of social media tools, including blogs (Blogspot), videos (YouTube), photo galleries (Flickr), mobile tweets (Twitter) and mobile widgets (Zumobi) to popularize the brand. The Voices campaign resulted in 1,500 blog posts with more than 8,000 comments.
Company: Fiskars
Campaign: Fisk-A-Teers
The "a-fisk-a-what?" link on the Fiskateers homepage gets right to the point:
Fiskateer. In other words, an ambassador for crafting. And for Fiskars. Why do we need ambassadors? Because we want to open the lines of communication -- to know the people who use our products. You are the ones who keep us in business. And we want to hear what you have to say about current and new products... We want to know about being a crafter/mom/working woman, and what you like about us and what you don't. We can take it, we promise.
Fiskateers is an ongoing campaign by the Fiskars company, traditionally known for its scissors, but more recently a maker of tools to meet the growing demands of rabid scrapbook hobbyists. The project relies on blogs and message boards to engage users with what Andy Sernovitz describes as "a fundamentally boring product." Sernovitz is CEO of GasPedal and adjunct lecturer in integrated marketing communications at Northwestern University.
Perhaps most importantly, through the campaign, Fiskars breaks the fourth wall by talking directly with its customers, including opening itself up to criticism. Fiskars also hosts real-world scrapbooking conventions as part of the campaign. Fiskateers.com brings in an estimated 353,000 visitors a week, according to Alexa traffic rankings.
Company: Duck Brand Duct Tape
Campaign: Stuckatprom.com
The Stuck at Prom campaign offers a prime example of how a brand can use WOM to capitalize on a trend it had nothing to do with creating. For years the DIY crafting community has been fashioning accessories and clothing from duct tape -- duct tape bracelets, duct tape wallets and eventually even duct tape prom dresses.
In 2001, Duck, a manufacturer of duct tape, decided it might as well get some publicity from the trend, so it started sponsoring an annual competition. Couples who fashioned their prom garb purely from duct tape could enter to win $3,000 for themselves and their schools.
Nineteen hundred couples have entered the contest since it first started seven years ago. Stuckatprom.com also allows users to email their friends and create T-shirts and flyers promoting their contest entries. Beyond WOM publicity, a variety of newspapers and magazines also cover the contest each year.
Company: McDonald's
Campaign: What Came First?
Many well-established brands also rely on WOM marketing, both online and off. This year, in an effort to get its customers to consider chicken a breakfast food, McDonald's rolled out its "What Came First?" campaign.
Visitors to Whatcamefirst.com (Quienfueprimero.com, for its Spanish-speaking customers) could help determine whether the chicken or the egg came first via a simulated chicken-egg dance-off. Users selected the player (chicken or egg), music and series of dance steps and watched the ensuing dance-off to see which animated character would win. Users could email their dances to friends, as well as challenge friends to a dancing duel. The campaign's web component also targeted key bloggers.
Offline, the campaign included a product sampling day, man-on-the-street interviews and live street dancing. "What Came First?" resulted in nearly 11,000 blog, video, messaging and Twitter discussions, and the free chicken sandwich sample was the "13th most Googled search term on the May 15th sampling day," according to WOMMA, which awarded the campaign its Wommie award this year.
Company: Intuit
Campaign: The Tax Rap
For a WOM campaign last year, financial software company Intuit turned to the incongruous pairing of TurboTax and has-been rap star Vanilla Ice. Ice and 500 others submitted raps about doing their taxes with TurboTax to a YouTube channel set up by Intuit for the contest. (The YouTube channel included the tagline "Just because we're experts in tax code doesn't mean we can't bust mad flow. Ahem.")
The participant with the best video was awarded $25,000; second- and third-place winners also received cash prizes. Winners of five Viewer's Choice awards received coveted cubic zirconium TurboTax bling. The combination of a celebrity spokesperson and user-generated content -- along with graphics and other media that gave consumers a sense that Intuit was in on the joke -- resulted in more than 3 million page views, more than 900 incoming links and 700 blog mentions, according to WOMMA.
So, how do you make WOM marketing work for your brand? Sernovitz advises that you stick to his 5 Ts:
Talkers. Identify the people who will do the talking for you. And remember, these people aren't always going to be your customers. They might be the mothers-in-law or the friends of the customer. Either way, they're going to be the ones starting the conversation about your product.
Topic. Unlike slogans and marketing messages, which no Joe Six-Pack is going use in real-world conversation, develop a broad topic your talkers can talk about. Lenovo's talkers could focus on how easy the company's tools made on-the-go communication; Fiskars customers can talk about how the company's products help with their favorite hobby or how much they like the community spearheaded by Fiskars.
Tools. Make sure the tools you select for spreading your message are ones that are likely to be used by your talkers. If your target audience is middle-aged bowlers, then Facebook and MySpace might not be the best places to start.
Taking part. Sernovitz warns that this T tends to scare marketers the most because it's the least familiar. "Most marketing departments are set up for one-way, outbound marketing," he says. But to get WOM to work, brands must participate in open-ended conversations on blogs and social networking sites. As the conversation grows, says Sernovitz, marketers must be willing to devote more resources to keeping it going.
Tracking. Marketers should also remember to build trackability into their campaigns. Secret discount codes in emails are extremely trackable, Sernovitz says. He adds that pretty much any action step that requires clicking or notifying others of an opportunity at the end of a WOM discussion will lead to the kinds of numbers marketers love.
Matt Moog, founder and CEO of Viewpoints Network, whose consumer review site is a WOM-based business, says it's important to keep campaigns simple and targeted. If a campaign "is barely related to your brand and doesn't do anything to reflect the product that you sell, that's not practical and sustainable," he says.
A recent example of a somewhat misguided WOM campaign comes via Ivanka Trump. Trump teamed up with Healthy Choice to promote its Fresh Mixers line, which essentially consists of MREs that can last up to a year in your desk drawer. Because when you think of eating a quick lunch at your desk, you think of... a Trump?
The campaign involves in-person appearances with Trump along with a blog she supposedly maintains at blog.alunchtrade.com. Though the campaign uses tools typical of WOM marketing, "It isn't really word of mouth," says Sernovitz. "Just because it's a blog doesn't mean it's word of mouth." Sernovitz suggests that Healthy Choice would have made a better marketing investment by focusing more on its message boards. He points out that thousands of visitors have posted on Healthy Choice's message boards, but that the company didn't get involved in those conversations. "They got the theory right, but the taking part was missing," says Sernovitz. "It just sort of faded away."
Leah Messinger is a freelance writer.
