'With WoM, it's not about the volumes of people you target but how connected they are in their social circle'
In one of three short films about word of mouth (WoM) marketing, Jane Pritchard from Tullo Marshall Warren talks about the dos and don'ts of this channel, including how to measure the success of a campaign and the pitfalls planners need to look out for.
There are also examples of WoM campaigns that have worked, including Cadbury's gorilla, Sony's Bravia, First Direct's customer acquisition programme and Procter & Gamble's Herbal Essences.
Watch the film and download our key insights into WoM marketing at the bottom of the page
You do not have Adobe Flash installed or Javascript is disabled in your browser.
To install Flash 9 plugin please click here.
If you are sure that Flash 9 plugin is installed, please check that Javascript is
enabled in your browser.
Common pitfalls of WoM marketing
Jane Pritchard: I think there are two pitfalls that you could fall into when you set up a word of mouth marketing campaign. The first one is really understanding that you can’t control the conversations that are going on about your word of mouth activity or your brand and product and service. You can only influence those conversations, and some brands have fallen into the trap previously of thinking that they can start to control them.
For example some brands have posed as consumers when actually trying to create word of mouth conversations about an individual product or service. Now when that comes to the fore and consumers find out about that, obviously the negative word of mouth activity you could have on the back of it could be quite severe. So in summary, it’s about influencing the conversations going on in a positive way but not controlling it, letting consumers having the time and the air to be able to voice what they need to about your particular brand or product is very important.
There’s a second thing to remember is that people are more likely to repeat a bad experience they have with a brand than a great one. So this means that the topic you introduce as part of your word of mouth marketing campaign has to be absolutely fantastic. If they view that topic in any negative way there are chances that they will voice that and share that with many more people, so it’s absolutely essential that you test that topic that you’re introducing to make sure that it absolutely is right for your target audience.
Assessing a WoM campaign
Jane Pritchard: Measurement and evaluation is really important in building a word of mouth campaign so you can effectively measure the success of it. The measurement and evaluation really contains two important parts. First of all there is the macro elements, which will include understanding the impact of the word of mouth campaign on sales and also potentially on brand awareness. The second element is more the micro elements that you need to measure and track. These can include number of posts that hit a website about your particular word of mouth campaign. It can be the number of times that someone for example views a video that you’ve created on YouTube.
So it’s really important to obviously factor in measurement evaluation both at that macro and also at that micro level. When it comes to the micro level what’s also important is that you don’t just track individual conversations, it’s much more about tracking preference. So this is understanding whether those conversations are actually positive or negative. So you can have a lot of conversations talking about your word of mouth activity, but they mightn’t be positive, so it’s essential that you continue to track really throughout the whole campaign.
The WoM audience
Jane Pritchard: It can be just as effective for a small audience as it can for a big audience. I think the thing to remember though is it’s not so much about the volumes of people that you target, it’s actually understanding how connected those people are in terms of their social circle. So how many times will they pass on your message to other people? If you’re targeting for example a customer that doesn’t have the opportunity or the reach to be able to communicate to numerous people therefore you might need to target more people at the beginning. So to summarise it’s really about the reach that those individuals have as opposed to the volumes that you target right at the very beginning.
Is WoM good for all sectors?
Jane Pritchard: I think some brands have a natural talkability with their end consumers, so if you take brands that fit into sectors such as FMCG, retail and also technology, those brands have a natural affinity with their own audience so creating word of mouth can be quite a relatively easy thing to do, obviously based on getting the right topic area in the first place. Brands that have successfully done that within these sectors include Sony in terms of Bravia, also Cadbury’s in terms of obviously the gorilla campaign and also Apple, which is a favourite case study that’s used all the time, but they’ve constantly exploited word of mouth and the benefits of it.
Sectors that can struggle with word of mouth if they don’t get it quite right are financial services, and this is principally because they’re communicating quite dry messages sometimes, quite factual messages so they have to think about the story that they’re actually delivering to create word of mouth. And I think First Direct have done that quite successfully because they’ve used their service as the topic area to create word of mouth with their customers, which has created a lot more business for them by encouraging more people to actually open bank accounts.
Procter & Gamble campaign
Jane Pritchard: I think Procter & Gamble are a great example of an institution that’s actually using word of mouth marketing in a really smart way. They’ve placed word of mouth marketing at the core of their strategy. It’s not just a tactical activity that they kind of include in their marketing mix. And this was demonstrated back in 2001 when they set up the Tremor marketing programme, which was all around recruiting teams to a database where they could market through word of mouth individual products or services.
They’ve had massive success with this using DM, including the campaign for Herbal Essence, where they mailed colour charts to these individuals that sat on the database and got them to actually talk to their friends about their hair colour. This obviously integrated with online activity where they could actually upload photos of themselves and change their hair colour and share it with their friends. So P&G really have that foundation going on in the background to run word of mouth campaigns at any point they want to because they have that engaged audience to talk to.