Word-of-mouth is the act of consumers sharing information with other consumers and creating buzz about products they care about. The key is that some consumers are more influential in various ways than others.
WOM marketing is a general term that implies:
- Giving people a reason to talk about your products and services, and making it easy for that conversation and resulting buzz to take place
- Buzz, viral, community, grass root, evangelist, referral cause-related, and several other types of marketing including:
- Stimulated WOM
- Attention-getting marketing activity and associated technologies to facilitate consumers’ ability to share the message (BMW Films campaign)
- An optional element involves providing an incentive to those who do forward messages to friends, awarding customers points redeemable for rewards when they actively promote a product (Affiliates programs)
- Natural WOM
- People talk about products all the time, even without being prompted: a McKinsey reports study reports that 27% of all personal conversations include discussions of products or services
- The discussions that take place online are essentially the world’s largest focus group -- only better. Natural WOM is a large-scale, continuous, up-to-the-moment source for gauging consumers’ spontaneous feelings about a brand
- Customer Influence Management technology solicits evaluations and ideas from a community of brand loyalists
- Stimulated WOM
Why is WOM Working?
- Participation: many consumers are no longer satisfied with only the thoughts and opinions of professional experts, but want to be involved in the process of discussing and interacting with product news and information.
- Relationality: many of the new forms of media that are currently emerging not only involve readers in the reporting and interpretation of news, but they create spaces where true communities spring up around the news and information being shared.
- Suspicion of Institution: government, religion, big business and other “institutions” are increasingly being viewed with suspicion.
- Customization: new media allows people to customize the information and news they want to consume. Using tools like news aggregation they can now choose the specific topics that they wish to follow and control when and how they consume information about those topics.
- Immediacy: no longer satisfied to wait for tomorrow’s newspaper or tonight’s news broadcast, people are increasingly following events in online in real-time.
