Grapevine

This Blog has moved

2005-11-02T19:44:00.000Z

Hi my blog has moved to .... http://standardclass.blogspot.com

The Economist

2005-04-21T08:38:00.000+01:00

If the Economist are writing about it, it must be becoming mainstream! Well done the economist for noticing that consumers have power and can be useful to companies. Thank you James for pointing it out to me.

Word of mouth marketing association conference

2005-04-15T16:55:00.000+01:00

For anybody interested in word of mouth marketing and unable to get to Chicago last month the team at WOMMA has put together a great resource after the conference, downloads, links etc
It is well worth checking out the coverage they link to as well, particularly items like the church of the customer podcast from the conference. Congratulations to the team for resourcing post conference communication the way it should be done.

Word Of Mouth Marketing Relies On Reputation Not Branding

2005-03-31T11:11:00.000+01:00

Brian Caroll over at web pro news wrote an interesting piece on word of mouth marketing relying on reputation rather than branding. I disagree with him, branding and reputation need to work in harmony. Without a good product it is difficult to build a good reputation, branding is part of that good product. Branding is becoming much more important as choice grows dramatically. If I shop using something like froogle I can switch brands in an instance. If somebody I trust has told me that Brand X is the only one to buy in a certain segment I am likely to be swayed to purchase it. Word of mouth marketing is an excellent tool to promote brands as well as individual products.

Advertising Age USA

2005-03-16T15:15:00.000Z

James Cherkoff over at Collaborate pointed me in the direction of an interesting piece in the US edition of advertising age. Scott Donaton scares me but not in the way he expected. It amazes me that his vision for the future is so uninspiring. Perhaps below the line agencies just see more of what is actually happening on the streets but reality is changing and advertising agencies need to keep up. I hope some of our great UK advertising agencies will realise this, perhaps one of the bigger independents will deliver a new agency to challenge the status quo. They would certainly reap the rewards if they did as the competition seems to be light years behind.

All Marketers are liars by Seth Godin

2005-03-10T11:33:00.000Z

I have just had a look at the "short, puffy one page promotional come on" of Seth's new book, it looks like he has written another "must read", I can't wait to see a bit more. I have been telling stories for the whole of my marketing career, whether it was in the form of live events and videos or now in word of mouth marketing. Stories are an ancient and most effective way of passing messages on from human to human. Our survival used to depend on remembering the messages they conveyed, now the future of brands rely on consumers accepting their stories.

WOMMA Ethics Code

2005-03-10T10:40:00.000Z

I read Dr. Frank Mitchell's comments on the WOMMA ethics code with interest, he began to make some interesting points about the word of mouth ethics code however stopped short of making any constructive criticism. Come on Frank, why not join in the discussion and give it to your students as a project? I know all feedback would be gratefully received by Andy Sernovitz of WOMMA. Here is your chance to make a difference Frank. Please don't let technicalities ruin the spirit of a document that is meant to be a voluntary code to follow, to me it is more an ethos than some sort of dictat.

Brand Ambassadors

2005-03-09T15:57:00.000Z

Paper White have written an interesting article on brand ambassadors on their site, it focuses on internal communications which is often a great place to start a word of mouth campaign.Encourage staff to offer better service and people will soon be talking about your product!

Bank attempts to kick start some word of mouth

2005-03-07T16:08:00.000Z

I got an interesting piece of direct mail today, First Direct the online bank operating in the UK and owned by HSBC sent me a pack to help recruit friends to first direct. They are a great bank as they say in their pack 97% of people surveyed would be happy to recommend them however;

The pack that they sent it in was boring and did not inspire me to open it.
They offered me £25 to get somebody to join which undermines my recommendation.
They made no attempt to make me feel special or closer to them.

However they did;

Enclose three little story cards of why First Direct is so great to pass on to friends
Give the friend who joins £25
Make it easy for me to pass the message on.

If they had given me assurance that I would not have been let down with my recommendation and made the offer altruistic I would have joined in. Unfortunately it ended up in the bin, good first effort though. By the way First Direct is great, if you are looking for a good bank please do join them.

Word of mouth in the book industry

2005-03-04T12:48:00.000Z

There is an interesting article in "The Independent" of the UK which compare the effectiveness of marketing methods publishers are using.

They found that "25% of those polled said that the last book they read was on the basis of what a colleague or family member had told them, with almost a third of under-35s citing it as the most important factor. Only loyalty to a favored author counted as much, with 26 per cent of readers saying their last choice of a book for pleasure was because they had read others by the same author."

I was amazed that teams who spend up to £100m on book advertising every year, only 6 per cent said they chose a book because they saw it advertised, with 7 per cent citing the cover design as the deciding factor.

They do however say that word of mouth takes a while to work, yes it can do but two years is not a long time if you have done no work to promote word of mouth. If publishers like Harper Collins started using word of mouth marketing techniques they might be surprised at the results!

Change This - Open Source marketing

2005-03-02T15:57:00.000Z

James Cherkoff over at Collaborate has done a great Change this manifesto on open source marketing. I love change this and try to read as many of their PDF's as possible as they always offer a refreshing insight. I think James has a good insight on open source but has tempered his piece a little to make it more commercially viable which is not a bad thing. The only way that this sort of approach will be adopted by the mainstream is in small bite sized chunks. I believe that it is one of the futures of marketing, it works well as a word of mouth strategy. Imagine the day that a company "briefs" anybody who is interested on their new campaign! gives them the brand tools to do it and lets them get on with it. I think that paying for spots that are used is great but a large amount of people doing this would probably be happy just to see their work aired! Lets not stop at print and TV advertising, why not events, stunts even sales promotion offers? good work James.

The anatomy of buzz: How to create word of mouth marketing

2005-02-28T09:30:00.000Z

Yvonne DiVita over at blogcritics has written a review of Emanuel Rosen's book the anatomy of buzz. She liked it and so did I. I have read a fair few books on word of mouth marketing but this one acts as a great stand alone primer for someone who wants to get into word of mouth marketing.

Word of Mouth Marketing Summit 2005 -- Chicago, March 29-30

2005-02-25T14:51:00.000Z

"There is only one thing worse that being talked about, and that's not being talked about!"
Womma are capitalizing on the momentum that they have gained since launching by holding a Summit in Chicago about all things word of mouth. Check out the programme, it is a must for anyone interested in Word of mouth or looking to spend budgets a little more effectively, for more info go to WOMMA if you use the discount code "charliesentme" you will get a $75 discount.

Stealth Marketing

2005-02-25T13:12:00.000Z

I have just been looking at Andrew M. Kaikati's Stealth marketing: How to reach consumers surreptitiously that was published in the California Management review last summer. Unfortunately it is a pdf that you cannot print out, which is annoying for anybody under 25. Apart from that it is a fairly well balanced piece if you are of an old school marketing persuasion trying to find the latest thing. However I fundamentally disagree with one point that "Stealth marketing is here to stay" Word of mouth is the element that has propped up stealth marketing, as knowledge passes faster the truth will always come out. Try re-reading the piece but applying a honest approach to all the tactics mentioned, it does not reduce the efficiency of any of the ideas. Instead of treating consumers like idiots work with them. Remember you're a consumer too.

The Scobleizer

2005-02-24T12:26:00.000Z

The Scobleizer comments on John Dvorak's The Microsoft Marketing Myth article, and concludes that companies need to build great products to create word of mouth. I think that this was certainly true in the past and may be true in the very high tech sector that Robert Scoble looks at. However in the majority of retail segments building a great product alone is not enough.

There are lots of great products all with imperceptible differences in features and function. How do you choose? You gain experience by proxy from friends and family, you use word of mouth to choose the right product for you in your situation.

This is why companies need to work hard at word of mouth strategy. How can the company do things that will help, not make, people talk about their products? I am not sure that The Scobleizer has it right with advertising and viral efforts as solutions. Word of mouth is often the most effective solution in these cases.

Brand is still so important, not logos but everything that makes a brand, the company ethos, tone of voice and all the people that come together inside and outside the company to make a brand.

Hats off to Microsoft for employing The Scobleizer, the best marketing move they have made in years, he has really got people talking about Microsoft in a positive way...there is a long way to go but it is no mean feat to change perception in the way Robert has done. The people make the brand lets hear from more of them.

Word of mouth ethics

2005-02-23T09:00:00.000Z

Congratulations to the word of mouth marketing association for their excellent draft ethics code, it is no small job to try and represent the variety of activites that are currently classed as word of mouth. For me the most important paragraph is " We never tell consumers what to say. People form their own honest opinions, and they decide what to tell others. We provide information, we empower them to share, and we facilitate the process-- but the fundemental communication must be based on the consumers' personal belief". For me this encapsulates everything that I do in word of mouth marketing. I agree with WOMMA that all ethical marketers should do the same, in the long term if they don't I think that they will cease to exist. There is little room in our ultraconnected world for dishonesty.

Revisiting the Clue train

2005-02-22T09:35:00.000Z

I was re-reading the Cluetrain manifesto the other day which just made my interaction with Wanadoo all the more amazing. My telephone exchange gets activated for broadband, at last, on 10th March so I was looking around for broadband packages and found one I felt was good value at Wanadoo.

So they had; me a very strong potential customer ready to place a pre-order in a market that struggles to differentiate and attract customers. Their response was not, please can we take your email address and we will contact you when we can offer you the service you have enquired about. It was check back when you can get the service! So they are happy to spend millions on direct marketing and advertising but were not keen to create a relationship with somebody trying to give them money!

I was so annoyed at their stupidity that I emailed their marketing team, unsuprisingly I never heard back, I have been probably been filed in the "uses green ink" folder. I was a Wanadoo evangelist waiting to happen...... not any more.

Word of mouth in New Media Age

2005-02-21T13:46:00.000Z

Nic Howell has written an interesting article in new media age, it is unsuprisingly an internet focused piece but they do mention WOMMA. Justin Kirby at the viral agency DMC, seems to believe that your target market and potential consumers are the same thing, perhaps in the online world. The beauty of analogue word of mouth marketing is that you can use individuals who are not potential consumers to spread the word, to connect between communities. Even if the individual is not a potential consumer they may well tell a potential customer about you.
I am glad that word of mouth is getting on the agenda in the UK at last.

Welcome

2005-02-18T09:28:00.000Z

Hi and welcome to the Grapevine blog, I am going to be blogging about word of mouth marketing.
Why?
I first became interested in the power of word of mouth and human interaction when I took a degree in sociology. I left university and went to work in marketing where the challenge of cutting through the noise became harder every year.
I am passionate about marketing with customers rather than at them which is why I am now preparing to launch the UK's first specialist word of mouth marketing agency.