Stranded and hungry between flights in an unfamiliar airport, or trying to decide between two new cars, who doesn’t welcome a trusted word of advice? Faced with a buying decision, everyone welcomes informed comment.
“Conversation is a natural phenomenon,” says Joseph Jaffe, president of New York-based marketing consultancy Crayon and the author of Join The Conversation. “Great content will naturally be viral; people love to share information.”
Combine these two strands of human nature—our hunger for inside information and our desire to seem like an insider—and the expansion of word of mouth (WOM) marketing seems like an inevitable outgrowth of social media. Using established bloggers or people with a desire to share their opinions in other ways, word of mouth specialists are adding the power of peer-to-peer persuasion to traditional media and PR campaigns. The key is to get products into consumers’ hands and let the conversations begin.
Given the marketing potential of personal endorsement, it’s little wonder that WOM expenditures hit $1.35 billion in the U.S. in 2007, up from $76 million in 2001, according to PQ Media Group, which forecasts annual revenue in the range of US$3.7 billion by 2011.
While development has lagged north of the border, Canadians are eager to join in, says Chris Emery, vice-president of corporate sales for Rogers Media’s consumer publishing division—the exclusive Canadian representative of WOM pioneer BzzAgent since last January. BzzAgent Canada recruits unpaid volunteers to try products and report on how they have spread the word about their experiences. Clients then work with the agency to select specific agents, based on screening forms completed online.
Citing a campaign created for Nabob coffee, Emery says he’s never seen such detailed reporting from consumer volunteers. “We know their engagement level is high because otherwise you’d have to be insane to provide this detail of reporting in return for something like two free cans of coffee.”
Of course, people being asked to chat, blog, Twitter or otherwise spread the word by BzzAgent Canada, Matchstick or Agent Wildfire—Canada’s three main WOM agencies—are sometimes getting considerably more than a couple of months’ worth of java. Suzanne Babb, who maintains a blog called Let’s Talk Organizing (LetsTalkOrganizing.blogspot.com), was one of a number of “influencers” loaned a 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan for a week as part of a WOM campaign staged on behalf of Chrysler by Toronto-based Matchstick. In addition to reporting that the minivan had a great storage spot for her purse, she raved that “the family absolutely LOVED it!”
“We don’t script what influencers say about a product,” says Matchstick co-founder Patrick Thoburn. “In accordance with the code of ethics of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, which we helped develop, we ask them to divulge their participation in the campaign, but we don’t control it in any way.”
“Authenticity is critical to the process,” says Jaffe. “The best WOM marketers realize that when you try to formalize conversation, people see that it’s not authentic. You need to understand what is natural and organic, and give it a platform.”
Founded by Dave Balter in Boston in 2002, BzzAgent quickly established itself with clients like Anheuser-Busch, General Mills and Volkswagen. Although the economic crisis took a bite out of revenues across the board at the end of 2008, Balter says the Rogers-BzzAgent alliance has exceeded his first-year expectations. “It’s been amazing,” he says. “The main thing has been Rogers’ ability to integrate the BzzAgent approach into their media business.”
To date, says Emery, 30,000 Canadian agents have signed up, and the company has worked with about a dozen clients, including Gay Lea Foods Co-operative. Janis Coburn, Gay Lea’s director of food service and retail marketing, says she turned to BzzAgent as a cost-effective way of reaching potential users of Spreadables butter. “Consumers have grown skeptical, but they tend to believe what other consumers tell them about their own experiences with a product, and people are always interested in sharing their opinions.”
“It has given us a real point of differentiation and rounds out our media offering,” adds Emery. “Most of the clients who approach BzzAgent Canada are media agnostic; they see word of mouth as one more tool to get the job done.” Other clients—like Gay Lea—use BzzAgent as a standalone offering.
Emery says more and more clients are catching on. “I think there was some early mystery around word of mouth, but now clients recognize that 85% of these kinds of product-related conversations happen off-line. What BzzAgent does is make it easier to talk about a product with some kind of interesting edge and accelerate the conversation.”
If one thing has helped WOM turn the corner into the mainstream, says Matchstick’s Thoburn, it’s effective measurement. He credits the work of Northeastern University professor Walter Carl, who has conducted widely quoted research on the subject. “Clients are well-versed in the various aspects of word of mouth now, 70% of our business is from repeat clients,” says Thoburn.
One of the early WOM proponents was Andy Sernovitz, CEO of Chicago-based GasPedal and author of Word Of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking. “Metrics aside, word of mouth works because it works,” he says. “Every company wants to have real customers talking about their products. In my experience, what sells it is that somebody tries it and sees how effective it can be. Time and time again, I’ve seen companies picking up on it because somebody inside the company becomes an advocate for it.”
Another powerful factor in WOM’s development is that it seems to be culturally neutral. “I haven’t seen any difference in the way it works in Canada or the U.S.,” says Sernovitz. “It’s about passion; if you love a product, you’re going to tell people about it, and you’ll do that in your own way.”
Matchstick co-founder Matthew Stradiotto agrees: “We’ve done work in both countries and haven’t noticed any discernible difference. There’s no question that it was stronger earlier in the U.S., but Canadians’ high uptake in Facebook indicates how much we’ve embraced social media. People on both sides of the border are motivated by the same things.”
It makes sense that marketers—whether in packaged goods, health and beauty or automobiles—are, too.
Concludes Jaffe: “If you believe in your product, why wouldn’t you want to put that into people’s hands and get them talking?”
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