Smart Marketing: Making Word-of-Mouth Work
February 25, 2008
Stay in the good graces of your "honeybee" customers
By Don Peppers & Martha Rogers
Honeybees are social insects, communicating with each other to exploit the food sources discovered by individual foraging bees. When a bee comes across a promising food source, it returns to the hive and does a little "waggle dance"; this tells the other bees where to fly.
So imagine for a moment that you are a food source for honeybees (i.e., a flower). With your bright colors and sweet scent, you have no trouble enticing a wandering honeybee to fly over for an on-site inspection. But when this bee gets back to the hive, it's only going to do its dance for the other bees if it's judged your nectar good enough to merit the return trip.
The moral of the story: If your customers rarely talk to each other, then advertising rules. Bright colors will get any single bee to zero in and take a look. But if your customers talk to each other, what really counts is the customer experience.
Because customers usually do talk to each other, it's important to recognize that a customer can create (or destroy) value for you, even if he never buys from you again. Taking this into account, here are a few tips to guide your word-of-mouth strategy:
• Focus on your customer experience. In an age of social networking, the experience you give your customers is more important than any advertising message. Start by earning their trust. Take the case of Apple, one of the world's most trusted brands. Customers expect Apple to build products that are easy to use, fun and technically sophisticated.
• Make it easy for customers to connect. Customers are increasingly empowered by interactive technologies to exert their influence over the configuration of the products and services they consume. To participate in this bonanza of customer-driven creativity, you need to make it easy, interesting and rewarding for your customers, because they drive the train. Your role is to make it simple for customers to connect with each other (what they usually want most) and to engage with you (what you want most).
This can occur in many ways. For example, Procter & Gamble lists thousands of its patents on yet2.com to facilitate connections and funnel new ideas from the outside. Yet2.com is a "global online marketplace" that brings buyers and sellers together to stimulate the creation of new intellectual property. Published Procter & Gamble reports credit this kind of approach with over 45% of its new product introductions over the last several years, helping to double its innovation success rate.
• Use monetary rewards cautiously. When you tell customers that you are willing to pay them for their referrals, you risk communicating that your value proposition isn't very strong. Having said that, it's not impossible to design a "member-get-a-member" program that is successful and also builds trust in your brand. But it's difficult to strike that balance.
MCI's original Friends & Family program is a good example of a word-of-mouth campaign that succeeded. The program involved recruiting the friends and relatives you called most frequently to join your "circle" on the MCI system, and then every circle member who signed up would receive a 10% discount on calls to other members of the circle. The mutuality of the benefit among friends made the program not only attractive, but also inoffensive.
The simple truth is, you can't really buy authentic word-of-mouth. After all, if it's not spontaneous, it's not really authentic. So the best you can do is to put in place conditions that drive positive word of mouth. Honesty, trust and straight facts are your most valuable currency of communication.
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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