Zenith Optimedia
From the desk of Strategic Resources
For any query, discussion or feedback, please contact Pavan Chandra, Head of Strategic Resources at pchandra@zenithoptimediaindia.com, +91-124-4195100. Office Address: 10th Floor, Vatika Tower, Block-B, Sector 54 Gurgaon -122002, Haryana, India.
Volume: IX December, 2007

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Fast Forward

     Word of mouth – or ‘buzz’ – marketing

How important is word of mouth, and how does it spread?

Word of mouth, or buzz, simply refers to consumers talking about brands. It is one of the most important factors influencing consumers’ decisions to purchase products or services. New technologies like the internet have increased the speed at which buzz spreads, and the distance it travels, often in a public and trackable manner. The internet is also a rich source of information for those consumers – information catalysts – who are most likely to spread information about brands. These are the people you have to reach if you want to influence the buzz about your brand.

Art Maldoon (BzzAgent): A recent study showed that eight out of ten consumers are heavily influenced by word of mouth before making a purchase decision. Conversation and sharing information helps consumers navigate all the marketing they are exposed to.

Bruce Goerlich (ZenithOptimedia): Our proprietary Touchpoint research shows that recommendations – whether from a friend, family member or professional expert – are almost 90% of the time the top Touchpoint – the element that most influences consumers’ decisions. However, even though it’s the most influential element, it isn’t necessarily the one that happens the most. So the interesting thing is how to stimulate that word of mouth, so that it does.

Todd Lowe (MTV): It’s now more measurable and transparent.

Eric Peterson (Moxie): Word of mouth has always been part of the consumer purchase equation, it’s just it always used to be in person or over the phone. Now technologies like the internet have increased the scale and speed at which it propagates. People used to talk to the expert in their inner circle, but now you can reach out that anonymous yet friendly group of experts out on the web. It’s become a matter of scale: you’re no longer relying on just one person’s opinion. And as technology has become easier to use, it is graduating across all age groups.

Bruce Goerlich (ZenithOptimedia): From research that we see, 73% of brand conversations happen face to face, and about 17% happen on the phone. That’s not to say that there are not a lot of conversations on the internet, but the real power of the internet is to make in-depth information available much easier and much faster. What the academic research shows is that there’s a small group of people that are information catalysts, and what the internet has done is allowed them to get that information much faster and to a broader group of people. There are certain people who go to the internet, get that information, then and have face-to-face conversations.

Eric Peterson (Moxie): I think that’s going to vary a lot by category – there’s a lot of participation on travel websites, for example. But people who have always liked to be influential now have another source of information to become that authority.

Bruce Goerlich (ZenithOptimedia): There are two types of these information catalysts. There are the 13-18 year-olds, who love to talk about brands. They’re involved in media and technology more, they’re going out to fast-food restaurants, they’re involved in areas where there’s a lot of information and a lot of new things happening. That’s one target. The other target is the upper income, well-educated, middle aged people who are the social authorities in their towns and cities. They’re not necessarily the richest people in town, but they’re the social activists. They can be conservative or liberal, they’re on the PTA, they’re the respected people in their communities that other people turn to and ask questions and advice about. Those are the folks who are most likely to spread information about brands.

Art Maldoon (BzzAgent): We work with a broad range of consumers from age 18 to age 80 or older, who are our buzz agents. We’ve signed up 320,000 people, about 70% of whom are female, and who are commonly about 25 to 40 years old. We have a lot of moms who enjoy the interaction we generate between consumer and marketer.
 

How to generate good word of mouth?

Consumers will naturally talk about the brands they like and good service they receive. A surprising story that resonates with the brand can ‘go viral’ as people pass it on to their friends and colleagues, emailing it and posting it to their blogs. But advertising can be a very effective way to stimulate conversations about brands. Word of mouth should be considered alongside all the other elements of marketing, not as a stand-alone discipline.

Eric Peterson (Moxie): Have a good product, have a good experience, and have good customer service, because all the buzz in the world isn’t going to help you if you don’t have those three things.

Art Maldoon (BzzAgent): It starts with a great product, and a great product experience. It’s imperative that you are open and transparent, so people don’t feel they are duped and not fully aware of what’s going on.

Mark Voysey (Cunning): Nine years ago, we did a piece of work that was regarded as a turning point in word of mouth. It was for FHM, where our brief was to encourage individuals to vote for the 100 sexiest women. We took an image of one of the contestants and, because the brief was about voting, we projected a 90 foot image of her half naked on the Houses of Parliament, arguably the ultimate voting institution in the world. We did that on a rainy Sunday night with one AP photographer and a project team of three people, and that has been seen by millions upon millions of people around the world and taught in four US universities. When we did it back then it was the second ever commercial projection. Projections are a dime a dozen now. We get asked about 20 times a year to do them, but they would mean nothing these days. So for us it’s about constantly reinventing the wheel, coming up with exciting new work that gets talked abut.

Todd Lowe (MTV): Mark’s FHM example is a great example in a couple of ways. The first person to market with a tactic has viral potential. That’s why it pays off to be on top of the latest tactics. But the reason why the FHM piece works is because there’s a story behind it. It’s not just anyone projecting anything on to any building, it’s that brand projecting that image on that location. And that goes back to the main part of our business, storytelling. What’s the story? The story is not just the image; it’s who did it, why they did it, what resulted from it.

Bruce Goerlich (ZenithOptimedia): About 63% of brand conversations are positive. If you have a good product or a good service, people are going to talk about it. The number one thing that stimulates conversations about brands television – seeing television ads, or seeing the product demonstrated on television – the next is the internet, then print. Having a multimedia strategy is critical in getting brands talked about. The content of that message has to be something new and information-rich, so that those people that like to talk about brands feel they have some inside information. Because people want to feel like they’re in the know, that they’ve got more information than others. And of course humour and sex sell as well, and get people to talk.

Art Maldoon (BzzAgent): We’re doing a campaign now for a computer for kids. We developed a guidebook for our agents for this computer, and we’ll send 10,000 of these computers to moms who have got kids, who will experiment with them in the marketplace. Along with the package will come coupons and perhaps stickers, pins and buttons to share. The agent who has volunteered to be part of the campaign gets the product and information about it sent to them, receives emails and surveys, submits reports to us, talks about it with their friends, family and colleagues. That agent will never forget the fact that they were part of this campaign. And they will tell this to the people in their network. 90% of the word of mouth is favourable. Think of what the experience would have been if instead of a package sent to you like a present, we gave you a US$5 coupon to buy the product in the store. A very different level of word of mouth and buzz gets created based on the experience you get.

Eric Peterson (Moxie): You’re not only  you’re giving them tips how best to experience and enjoy.

Bruce Goerlich (ZenithOptimedia): What I’m concerned about is that our clients don’t just think about buzz as something you do as a special event. People talk about the big brands because they’re big spenders on multimedia marketing, because they’re in newspapers, because they’re on the web, because they’re doing event marketing, because they are out-of-home. The generation of conversation has got to be in all these different kind of places.
 

Tracking buzz

Agencies and clients need to agree some measure by which they can track how successful the campaign has been. The measure will vary from campaign to campaign, depending on the client’s goals and how the campaign is conducted.

Damon Peirson (Zenith Media): People can do a buzz-generating campaign, and then half way through realise they need to measure it. The one thing we say upfront is that we should figure out something we can measure buzz by, whether it’s by website visits, or handing out flyers that people can scratch off and redeem. We’ve just finished a campaign where people who walked by a window triggered an interactive graphic that crashed to the other side of the building. We put a motion detector there to see how many times it was triggered, and how many times people stopped in front of it. The big question is, what is the client trying to get out of the campaign?

Todd Lowe (MTV): It depends on the campaign. Campaigns with digital elements have the kind of metric that you would expect from any digital programme. You get unique visits, time spent engaged on the site, page views, and so on. We don’t have a lot of requests for advanced tools like Technorati, Blogspot or Google Trends. But we’re going to go down that road.

Mark Voysey (Cunning): We go into the measurement part of any project in the same bespoke way that we develop creative. We worked with HSBC to produce something called ‘Live Theatre’, which was up here in Manhattan. A bank is not the most exciting of places, but because we juxtaposed that with beauty queens and sports fanatics jumping up and down throwing popcorn about on the high street, people stopped and it watched it, and talked about it later. The aim was simply to build buzz, without any targets up front. After ten days of activity there we created such a buzz that they trebled new account openings in that bank. So it became instantly quantifiable.

Art Maldoon (BzzAgent): We measure word of mouth for clients in three ways. First, we look at the propagation of word of mouth in terms of generations. Our buzz agents, who receive the initial product experience, are Generation Zero. The people they interact with will be Generation One, and the people Generation One interacts with are Generation Two. We generally stop our initial measurements at Generation Two, but a good campaign will always continue beyond them. Feedback from Generation One allows us to quantify the total reach the campaign achieves. On average each agent will lead to about 60 communications between Generation Zero and Generation Two.

Second, every agent reports back to us about their campaign experience, creating a very rich database for us. For example, for a recent campaign we received 15,000 research reports back from the field. Our clients can then tap into the database, and see how the product was received, whether it was available in the agent’s area, whether they liked the packaging, if they were able to use it, how well it worked. We can measure the insights that are generated in the field as well as the buzz. The third part is the overall impact. We can do tests and control campaigns in different markets to see how much we can affect direct sales, or coupon redemption rates. It starts to get a little more scientific, in ways that marketers expect to measure other types of media.

Bruce Goerlich (ZenithOptimedia): It’s setting up a strategic discipline. It’s very good if you can come up with a tactical evaluation of a particular execution. All executions should have some specific measure of success. But then I think you have to raise it up to another level, which is consistently tracking word of mouth. You can do that through TalkTrack, or Blogspot or Google Trends or whatever. The third level is how word of mouth integrates into your overall communication campaign. If we just think of word of mouth as these one-off tactical executions, we’re really doing our client a disservice. We should really be thinking of it on a strategic level, which is that this is a communication channel we need to get the most from on an ongoing basis.
     

Responding to brand conversations

By paying attention to what people are saying about your brand, you can identify problems and address them. This can turn negative buzz into positive buzz – people who have been listened to and whose problems have been solved can feel better about a brand than people who have never had any problems at all.

Eric Peterson (Moxie): A lot of people focus on buzz as one-way, but you should always be monitoring it. Because whether or not you’re the catalyst for it or you’re participating in it, people are talking about you, sharing experiences with others. It’s a tremendous marketing tool, and you should be recycling that back in. You can turn a bad situation into a good one if you are attentive to people’s concerns and address them.

Art Maldoon (BzzAgent): For every agent that sends us feedback, we have a communications developer – a real human being – read and respond to that report. So when we get bad feedback about a product we have someone who can be there to move it into a more positive light. If an agent can’t find the product in store, we can tell them which stores to look in. If they misunderstood the intended use of the product, we can help them. A few years ago a shipment of coffee makers we sent out to the agents was defective, and some of them caught fire.

Through the agents we were able to track back the serial codes and identify that shipment, and reship them and send out apologies. The agents in the end felt they were served well because they understood what the problem was and that the manufacturers addressed it. If the underlying product is strong but there’s a misunderstanding in the marketplace, there are ways to modify that.

So if you’re doing a broad buzz campaign, what mechanisms do you put in place to troubleshoot in the event things don’t go as you expected? How can you insert yourself at any point and reframe what’s happening?

Todd Lowe (MTV): You should build flexibility into your process. You should decide in advance that you’re going to step in and optimise.

Bruce Goerlich (ZenithOptimedia): I think you need to do it all the time. I think any brand has to understand that people are talking about you all the time. You were talking about the power of the net. The power of the net is that comments can be distributed much more quickly. Brands need to be monitoring this and then adopt an attitude of quick response. So it’s not just when you have a particular event. Those conversations are happening all the time. Number one, have a good product, and number two, be responsive.
 

Pitfalls to Avoid

A new event or stunt is more likely to be talked about, but it also risks unexpected repercussions. It is important to understand the audience you want to reach, communicate with them honestly and transparently, and be mindful of how people outside your target audience might react to the story.

Damon Peirson (Zenith Media): To get buzz you have to be the first to come up with something, and it can be on the line between legal and illegal.

Mark Voysey (Cunning): Look at the Cartoon Network’s campaign for its Adult Swim strand. They put some cheap boxes around Boston, one was put in the wrong place and suddenly the bomb squad’s called in, part of Boston is shut down, and the story’s all over the world’s mainstream media.

Eric Peterson (Moxie): If you invite people to make videos about your brand, remember to look through the videos to screen some out before you publish them. We’ve had agencies who have tried to save face by saying they meant to let people make fun of the brand, but you need to have your infrastructure set up beforehand. Of course, it’s easy to say it in hindsight. You have to tip your hat to the folks who try it first, and thank them for teaching you some lessons that you won’t have to suffer through.

Bruce Goerlich (ZenithOptimedia): You need to understand your target. One advertiser with an older female target asked them to submit videos about an experience. After spending a million dollars they received three video submissions, one of which came from the agency. So you need to understand whether this type of event will appeal to the target. For a lot of categories this is hard – it’s a lot easier when you can put pretty girls on buildings.

Mark Voysey (Cunning): It’s not just about talking to the right people, it’s about talking to them in a genuine and authentic way. An example is the PSP launch, with the spray-painted graffiti ads, which got absolutely flamed on the gaming blogs. They thought it was totally disingenuous and false.
 

The future of word of mouth

As technology improves and is adopted throughout the population, more information will spread to more people more quickly. Marketers will be able to track conversations about their brands in more detail, and will be able to participate in these conversations more effectively. As this happens it will become an integral part of the marketing process.

Bruce Goerlich (ZenithOptimedia): What I hope will happen is that all brands will treat word of mouth as integral to marketing communication, and build it into their strategic process. So there’s an understanding you need to track it, both positive and negative, that you need to develop it. It’s not simply events, it’s an ongoing dialogue that’s happening with or without you, so you might as well join the conversation. It’s a conversation you need to continually have with your consumers.

Mark Voysey (Cunning): The technology is developing so quickly, I don’t think anyone can say where we’re going to be in five years time. But it’s going to be an even more democratic marketplace than the one we exist in at the moment. A fascinating area will be the use of social networking sites; sharing content among your peer group is going to be a big cultural change. Also, the technology will continue to spread through the different demographics.

Eric Peterson (Moxie): I think we’ll lose the ‘buzz’ out of buzz marketing, and it’ll all be looked at as marketing. As Bruce says, it’ll be part of the fabric and framework.

Todd Lowe (MTV): We’re going to get a better sense of who we should be talking to, and who they’re talking to. We’re going to see who our best catalysts are, and we’re going to talk to them in more meaningful ways.

Damon Peirson (Zenith Media): I think we’ll see a lot more 360 degree programmes, where we tie together what we’re doing with different media with word of mouth.

Art Maldoon (BzzAgent): As technology improves it will give marketers more and more detail about how these conversations are happening in accountable and forecastable ways, which makes this a legitimate form of marketing.

This tracker has been compiled from external sources and does not necessarily reflect the views of the company.
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