personalization. For example, @AmericanExpress, which sponsored an “Unstaged” Pharrell Williams concert, sent tweets personalized and autographed to people who livestreamed the event.49 Participation and personalization—combined with continuity, being continually in touch with consumers—are the tools marketers use to sustain long-term relationships, particularly with the ever-important Millennials whom they know are most likely to share, share, share.
2
Marrying marketing messages to editorial content is not done because of some malicious plot by advertisers to fool us. To their minds, they are providing cost-effective, useful information and entertainment . . . that just happens to be produced by a marketer. And if you like it enough to share it with your friends and family, all the better.
In one fundamental way, this is not all that different from traditional forms of marketing. In the mass media model, the idea was to promote to a lot of people in hopes of finding the “Early Adopters”—who today are called “Influencers”—who would then tell their neighbors and friends about the promotion.1 You might remember the commercial from Fabergé Organics shampoo, where a woman says that she tried the shampoo and loved it. She told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on and so on, with each “so on” leading to the screen being divided into more and more people. That is the idea behind word of mouth (WOM). One person tells a friend, who tells another friend, until the product becomes a topic of conversation and the latest must-have product. Alternatively, companies have used PR tactics to get trusted others to do the selling that advertising could not. For example, the father of PR, Edward Bernays, promoted Beech Nut bacon by coaxing doctors to recommend the benefits of the product to their patients,2 and bartenders have long been an important component to selling alcoholic beverages. Now, with the rise of digital media—and in particular social media—a number of those discussions have moved online. Marketers amass tracking data based on our interactions and can use it to find Influencers, who might be professionals (like Bernays’s doctors), celebrities, or simply fans of a brand. With this ability, messaging tends less toward mass advertising and more toward Bernays’s one-to-one cloaked methodologies.
Talking about products and brands has become part of day-to-day conversation. In the past, we gave someone information about a product or service because we wanted to be helpful, or because we wanted to appear in the know. You might run into your neighbor and say, “Try Fabergé Organics,” or more likely, “Sam the butcher will order special lamb chops for the weekend if you tell him by Tuesday,” or “I just saw that the record store is having a sale starting on Friday. You better get there early.” Today, you might tell a friend, “I just saw the new Avengers movie. You should really go see it,” or, more likely, you post the movie’s trailer on Facebook and tell your friends what you thought. Similarly, you might provide a link to a business article on Twitter or LinkedIn or post wedding dress ideas on Pinterest. Online, these communications are to be helpful, for sure. The difference, though, is that the technology has been created in such a way as to compel us to share information, and we are not sharing with one or two people, but more likely two or three hundred.3 A few hundred may still not seem like a lot, but if just a handful of people share with their friends, it can scale to reach as many people as some television programming. According to social media company Lithium, if a brand conversation reaches more than a thousand people, it can “generate up to half a million conversations about your brand,” which is the modern-day version of the so on and so on idea. To reach those numbers, marketers find (or pay for) “Superfans.” These well-connected, digitally plugged in folks generate three to five times more word of mouth (WOM) messages, and those messages are four times more likely to have an impact on purchase decisions.4 And most importantly, word-of-mouth recommendations are responsible for 20 to 50 percent of purchases, according to McKinsey & Company.5 Bottom line: companies need to get people talking about their product, and the more the better. Luckily for them, because of digital technology we share more content with more people than we ever have, more quickly and more often.6
Perhaps unexpectedly, while it feels like we share an awful lot online, the vast majority of word of mouth happens in offline conversations. According to research from the Keller Fay Group, “91 percent of respondents’ information about brands came as a result of face-to-face conversations or over the phone.”7 While this is true, those offline conversations are facilitated by word of mouth marketing, and that marketing more than likely happened online. Word of mouth marketing is defined as “the technique of promoting a product, service or business by soliciting positive comments from satisfied customers. Word of mouth marketing is an interactive process such that customers are collaborating with the business, product or service for which they have derived enough satisfaction that they are willing to speak out about it and even recommend it to others.”8 Word of mouth marketing, then, asks consumers to talk about products and services. More often than not this will include some remuneration for us, like a coupon or a prize for having participated in a contest, and for Influencers repayment is typically free products or cash payments—a form of paid endorsement that we do not see.
Marketers consider one person telling another about a product to be the most effective form of advertising because—not surprisingly—people trust their friends and family more than they trust an advertiser. According to Nielsen’s Trust in Advertising report, word of mouth is the most influential form of advertising, with 84 percent of respondents saying it was the most trustworthy.9 Word of mouth is integral to stealth forms of marketing because “peer group recommendation is the ultimate marketing weapon.”10 With WOM marketing, although the idea gets seeded by the marketer, consumers sell it to one another, and it doesn’t feel like marketing.
WHAT WE SHARE
Marketers have traditionally used a combination of what are called push and pull strategies. For push strategies, think about a pushy salesperson. They push the product on you. That is like the old broadcast media model. The opposite of that is a pull strategy, where consumers like the product so much that they help pull it through the distribution channel. That is what word of mouth marketing is all about. To facilitate WOM, marketers use a number of different tools to get us to engage with and then ultimately talk about their products.
Marketing professor Colin Campbell and his colleagues developed a helpful way to categorize the types of messaging available, which is to delineate media based on two axes: (1) who created the content, and (2) whether the content was paid or unpaid.11 Building on Campbell’s work, I have revised the template to reflect current terminology, as well as to present it as a tool for thinking about how different methods facilitate sharing.
BRANDED CONTENT MESSAGING STRATEGIES
Source: Based on Campbell et al (2014).
Starting on the top line, content creators can be the brand (Coca-Cola, for example), a combination of the brand and the news media (Coca-Cola and the New York Times), the news media alone, or the user—that is, you and me. Unpaid content, or earned media, is publicity—for example, when a product is mentioned on a news story or an author appears on The Late Show—and paid media is, of course, advertising. Editorial content is the only element in the chart that is not—or at least not necessarily—influenced by corporate bias.
Below, we will look at examples of word of mouth strategies, including viral videos, consumer-generated content, and sponsored word of mouth. Native advertising and content marketing, the most covert of the types, will be discussed in subsequent chapters. Bear in mind that the point of view, the bias
