Is word of mouth alone powerful enough to escalate a product or brand to the tipping point?

With companies now spending in excess of $1billion on word of mouth campaigns, it would appear targeting opinion leaders, to spruk your product or brand is becoming big marketing business.  

But, does it really work?  Over the next twelve weeks I’m on a mission to find out whether word of mouth marketing is powerful enough to escalate a product or brand to the tipping point. To be able to answer this question a definition of word of month and the tipping point is needed.

First lets define word of mouth marketing.  When opinion leaders or change agents informally influence the actions, attitudes of opinion seekers through personal contact, such as phone, email, chat, direct face to face or social media means.

According to Malcolm Gladwell, the tipping point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, and the boiling point. It is the point when everyday things reach epidemic proportions. 

There are three distinct characteristics of epidemics or contagiousness when change happens not gradually, but at one dramatic moment.

• The law of the few – according to Gladwell success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of a few people with a particular set of social gifts.
• The stickiness factor – the content must render the impact memorable.
• The power of context – epidemics only work when the environment is right.

Malcolm Gladwell states that word of mouth alone is powerful enough to take a brand to the tipping point. This is that magical moment when and idea, product or trend spreads like wildfire.  According to Gladwell this happened to Hush Puppies in 1994.

Hush Puppies was a dying brand.  With their shoe sales down to only 30,000 pairs per year, company executives were thinking seriously about discontinuing the product.

Then something happened.  Between 1994 and 1995 they were able to significantly influence consumer perceptions of the Hush Puppy brand by activating a number of New York fashionisters to talk about the product – using a range of social media channels. The opinion leaders spoke to other fashionisters who followed suit. The ‘cool’ kids spoke to the fashionisters, the less cool kids spoke to the cool kids…. And so on.  The word on the street reached a critical mass that caused an explosion and put Hush Puppies back into the fashion scene.  In 1995 the company sold 430,000, an increase of around 70%, and the next year it sold four times that.

Within 2 years Hush Puppies sales exploded by 5,000% without a penny spent on advertising.

Wow, if this is truly possible why aren’t more companies slashing their marketing budgets and engaging opinion leaders to engage in word of mouth activity?Have you got other brand or product stories that provide further evidence that word of mouth marketing alone can take a brand to the tipping point? 

Or is the Hush Puppy case just a story of luck and being in the right place at the right time?