Word of mouth marketing in a nutshell

Is WoM the same as customer recommendation?

Jane Pritchard: Plain old customer recommendation is usually solely based on a brand’s product or service performance.  So I might say to my friend, Sue, that Persil washing powder is a great washing powder to use because it makes my whites white. It doesn’t really give me much dimension to really create much talkability with Sue about that brand, so word of mouth marketing is really about creating richer and deeper conversations with consumers.  So these can be driven by a brand experience.

It can be driven by communication or it could be simply driven by brands creating spaces for consumers to actually talk about their products or services. So it actually moves away from just what the performance of the product is to actually the engagement and the relationship that that consumer has with the brand.  Customer recommendation is a part of that, but it’s a much bigger story when it comes to word of mouth marketing.

What is word of mouth best for?

Jane Pritchard: Word of mouth marketing is best for letting consumers actually talk about your individual brands, products and services. So it kind of goes against the grain of marketing say five to ten years ago, which was very much about pushing messages on to consumers, so they believed in your product or service. This is really about giving them air to breathe and letting them form their own opinions about your products or services. 

The great thing about word of mouth marketing is that actually consumers are really up for it; they want to be involved in this type of marketing. So there are stats that suggest for example that 56% of people actually really, really look for recommendations from people just like themselves even ahead of recommendations of brands or government bodies for example.

Another thing that’s really encouraging is that around 75% actually want to pass on good news about products or services to other people just like themselves. So there’s a real consumer appetite for word of mouth marketing. I think the overall objective really is to create brand advocates on an ongoing basis that will continue to support your products and services to people just like themselves.

Using the WoM approach

Jane Pritchard: I think it’s important to remember with word of mouth marketing that it is actually a strategic approach; it’s not necessarily a marketing technique in a true kind of tactical way. You use marketing techniques to actually achieve word of mouth, so really it’s your end goal, it’s not actually the vehicle to deliver that objective. So techniques that you might use for example to create word of mouth would be techniques such as buzz marketing, viral marketing, seeding of product samples. 

It might even be influencer marketing, which is really looking and pinpointing those brand ambassadors that have the greatest opportunity to communicate your message. So I think in summary, it’s really to understand that word of mouth marketing is very much about your strategic approach.  It’s about the end goal.  It’s not about comparing or competing with other marketing techniques.

Creating a WoM campaign

Jane Pritchard: There are really three essential things that you need to set up and run a successful word of mouth marketing campaign. The first thing is to have an exciting topic to share with your end consumers and this can be driven by a marketing event, an experience that you share with that end consumer. It could be a piece of communication such as the Cadbury’s gorilla campaign that was run last year, or it could be for example just a space that consumers can actually engage with your brand and talk about your brand. 

So first of all, it’s about actually creating a really great topic that will create the talkability that you need. The second element is actually to identify those consumers that are more likely to actually transmit the message that you’re trying to communicate. So there’s a certain amount of profiling that needs to go on at the very beginning of a word of mouth marketing campaign to ensure you identify the right people to transmit your message. 

The final ingredient of a word of mouth marketing campaign is to make sure that you monitor the success of that campaign. So that’s both at a macro level, so understanding the impact of what a word of mouth marketing campaign can actually have on your brand awareness or on your sales results, but also at a more micro level, so understanding for example online how many conversations are actually happening about your word of mouth marketing topic, and really making sure that all of those comments are actually positive comments.

So, in summary, three very important things:  you’ve got to have an exciting topic to talk about; you have to know those transmitters that will pass on the message; and then very finally you need to track the response of the word of mouth marketing campaign to make sure that obviously it achieves the objectives you’ve set.