Word of Mouth Marketing
Posted on September 21, 2006, 2:14 am by Manshu under E-commerceFunny thing happened the other day when I went shopping for socks. I had decided that I would buy a pair of socks but had not settled on the brand. When I went to the mall the options were Reebok, Nike and Adidas. Without the slightest bit of doubt I went ahead and bought Nike. That’s not the funny part; the funny part is the trigger for my purchase. I had just finished reading “It’s not about the bike” autobiography of Lance Armstrong and the part where he had mentioned that Nike stuck by him all through his illness and supported him and never once talked about reneging his contract impressed me and stayed somewhere in my mind. So while buying the socks I figured the quality that all the three companies will offer me will be more or less the same and so is the price so might as well buy Nike because they had been good to Armstrong. Now on the face of it the fact that you buy a pair of socks because the company has been good to someone living in another continent may well sound really amusing but the more I thought about it the more it dawned that we do this all the time.
This is what marketers call word of mouth marketing. No matter how many dollars Nike spend to tell you what a noble company they are you will not believe it till some one else who has no stake in the company tell you the same thing. Almost all if not all of us buy something, some time or the other because the product of that company has been good for the people we knew and they had been vocal enough to express it.
The absolute truth is that word of mouth plays a big role in our purchase decisions whether we like it or not and most times even without us not realizing it. The facts that are not so clear are how do you get good word of mouth press for your product and how do you measure whether it is working or not.
I think here it is easier for most entrepreneurs to spread a good word than it is for most business houses. Why? Because businesses are run by managers who are more interested in short term gains rather than building a long term brand. And the only way to gain good public image is to really care about your customers and help them out even if it means in the short run you lose out on a few bucks. For an entrepreneur this is easier because at least in theory they will always be associated with their business forever and would want to nurture it and grow it and should therefore have a long term view. What makes keeping this view constant difficult, is the fact that the return on investment on such things is almost next to impossible to measure.
A lot has been said about properly channelising word of mouth and giving it a structure however for any business it is imperative to understand that word of mouth means you giving a positive review about something you are happy with.
That is the long and short of it. Before you jump on to spreading a good word about your product look inside your company and ask yourself honestly - Are you doing all that you can to keep your customers happy? And if not, then before embarking on such a project foster a culture where the customer comes first even if it means losing out on some short term gains. Without having something which people can really rave about there is no use of trying to channelise word of mouth as chances are you would end up in getting negative press from disgruntled people who consider your company as one who just talks without really paying any real attention to what they.
Manshu Verma
