BOOK REVIEW: JOHN FANNINGreviews Buzz: Real-life Lessons in Word-of-mouth Marketing, by Emanuel Rosen; Profile Business Books; £9.99
WORD OF mouth is the latest topic du jour in marketing communications circles. In the last two years it has been the subject of special conferences, numerous learned papers, case histories and a few books. There are now specialist word-of-mouth consultancies who promise to treble your sales, double your profits and if you let them talk long enough, guarantee immortality.
It’s not a new phenomenon; it’s been around forever. As soon as people began to talk to one another they were yapping away about the merits or otherwise of this product or that service. The reason for its sudden prominence is twofold. Firstly there’s the growth of the internet, the mobile phone and social networking. These technological developments have significantly increased the time we spend talking to our friends and number of acquaintances with whom we can have regular access. The second reason stems directly from the first: because it has become more important it has become more professional. Until recently word-of-mouth was a kind of bonus. If you had a brilliant product or offered a brilliant service people would talk favourably about you to their friends with every chance of sales benefiting as a result. Failing that, if you were in the same boat as most products and services, more or less interchangeable with a range of competitors, you could generate favourable word-of-mouth through an entertaining advertisement or an innovative sales promotion, PR or relationship marketing campaign that people wanted to talk about. Now there are specialist companies offering to start, or in the inevitable jargon, seed, word-of-mouth from scratch.
Buzz is one of the new books on word-of-mouth although it is actually an expanded version of an earlier book by the same author, Emanuel Rosen: The Anatomy of Buzz. This was a national bestseller in the US and has been translated into 11 languages. Rosen thinks "Buzz" is a better name than word-of-mouth; I don't so I'll stick with the original. The book ranges far and wide over the subject but I want to concentrate on four areas of particular importance.
The first is the critical issue of who are the most influential carriers of word-of-mouth communication. There has always been an assumption that in every market there are "opinion leaders" whose attitudes and behaviour have significant weight. The publication of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point(2000) renewed interest in the subject with its intriguing designations of mavens, connectors and salesman. Rosen prefers the term "hubs" and distinguishes between "social hubs" – people who know and communicate with many others – and "expert hubs", people who know a lot about a particular subject.
The second area is how can we identify these “hubs”. Rosen offers some useful advice for how this can be achieved in individual markets.
The third area is more controversial: how to stimulate, incentivise or manipulate (take your pick) those opinion leaders or hubs actively to spread the word about your product or service?
The book gives some details about a company called BzzAgents, a word-of-mouth company that maintain a panel of volunteers who spread the word about products. For one product launch they recruited 30,000 people in the US who were given free samples and coupons to spread the word. One of the most powerful marketing businesses in the world, Proctor Gamble, has set up its own company, Tremor, started in order to stimulate word-of-mouth. The fact that PG is taking word-of-mouth this seriously is sufficient testament to its importance, but it does raise the type of ethical questions that surround another, always around but newly professionalised, channel or marketing communications medium: product placement, or if you prefer, embedded marketing.
The final issue, inevitable once professionalism occurs, is measurement. For a long time it was assumed that word-of-mouth was impossible to measure but there have been developments in recent years and a number of market research companies are now offering a form of tracking study for the medium. The growth of blogging and social networking has made many companies fearful about what is being said about their brands in the blogosphere. There are specialist companies who will collect data on a regular basis about what’s being said about your brand.
This book will be useful to anyone trying to come to terms with an area that’s going to become much more important for everyone in the marketing communications business. But like all American business bestsellers, particularly expanded editions of original bestsellers, it also comes loaded with gushing blurbs from US marketing’s great and good, labelling it “brilliant”, “definitive” and “a classic”. It’s not: in the immortal words of our national football treasure it’s a good book, not a great book. Admittedly one major flaw is common to an alarming number of books on marketing communications: the complete absence of any conceptual context. In particular, the relationship between word of mouth and other methods and channels of marketing communications is ignored most of the time and glossed over when it does surface. Creative and innovative marketing communications – from advertising to relationship marketing, from sponsorship to design – all have the capacity to generate hugely valuable word of mouth. But the two areas of marketing communication which probably have the most direct relationship with word of mouth are sales promotions or, if you prefer more faddish terminology, brand activation, and public relations.
In order to put word of mouth in its proper context, these complex relationships need to be explored. However, in the absence of a more rigorous text Buzzis a useful introduction to the subject.
John Fanning is the author of The Importance of Being Branded: An Irish Perspective, published by the Liffey Press.
He is also a non-executive director of The Irish TimesLtd
