Get Your Customer's Talking

WOM secrets to success

With marketing budget’s shrinking, growing pressure to win more customers and more people networking through social media, WOM is a critical strategy to have in your marketing mix.  But, what strategies can you adopt to increase customer’s talking about your brand.  In my earlier blogs I looked at a number of successful WOM campaigns that have enabled companies to reach the tipping point.

The key take-outs from these campaigns were:

• Get a few people of a particular set of social skill involvement in spreading the word first. Provide opportunities for influences to have a conversation on behalf of your brand. This could be as simply as an online forum for selected customers, like E.L James did to develop her 50 Shades of Grey story line.
• Release content that is highly creative that’s aligned to your audience’s interests. Creative content will increase the stickiness factor and render the content memorable.
• Launch your product when you know your market it ready to adopt the new idea.

Today I’d like to give you a few more simple strategies to get customers talking about your brand immediately and ongoing.  These tips are based on research conducted by Berger and Johan in 2011. 

Tip 1 – how to drive up immediate WOM.

Research shows that products that offer more interest to customers will receive more immediate WOM than products that don’t.  

Be interesting by being interested in your customers

Following this philosophy will help you keep your product interesting and increase immediate WOM for your brand. Do you think Starbucks in the US became so popular because of their $4.00 lattes? No they became popular because they offered customers a unique product as well as a customerised experience. This intense focus on their customers drove interest and talk about their brand. It’s a shame they haven’t been able to continue that level of customer interest as their brand has grown globally.

Another way to drive interest in your brand is by launching innovative promotional activities. A company that is famous for this style of WOM promotional activity is Red Bull. Red Bull embraces its brand vision, ‘Red Bull gives people wings’ through ever thing it does. This translates into a company that pushes the boundaries of what’s possible.  An example of how they met this philosophy and increased WOM significantly was their sponsorship of the Red Bull Stratos space diving project, which involved Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner going into the stratosphere before free falling in a pressure suit and then parachuting to Earth. Alone the You Tube video of the Felix Baumgartner’s freefall to date has received 34 million views.

Click here for You Tube video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHtvDA0W34I

Tip 2 – driving ongoing WOM.

Research shows that whilst people want to talk about interesting things, in reality people’s conversations revolve around things that are mundane and day-to-day. This means that the products people mostly talk about are those that are publicly visible, i.e. those that spring to mind.  Therefore, if you want your product to be talked about, you must make it visible to your target market.

An example of this is Red Bull progressive marketing activities. To keep their brand visible they push their brand forward by engaging social and digital media and centering their customers at the heart of their promotional campaigns. Red Bull uses innovative marketing techniques to listen and react to their audience in relevant and engaging ways.

Tip 3 – driving immediate and ongoing WOM.

Research shows that products that are cued to the environment are more likely to increase WOM. A great example of this is the campaign launched by Michelob beer in 1978, “The Weekend’s are made for Michelob beer”. Michelob beer launched a campaign that link the weekend with their beer using social media as a platform. This commercial demonstrates a simple and effective why to build a strong connection between a product and consumer activity Michelob beer and consuming over the weekend break and drive up relevant WOM conversation about your product. 

Whilst thinking up environmental clues that work with the type of product you have this is an extremely effective strategy to adopt and worthwhile putting time into developing a number of good environmental marketing ideas to test.

Michelob Beer 'Weekends' Commercial (1978)

Click here for the commercial

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1uaCmBXrU

Berger, Johan (2011), What Drives Immediate and Ongoing Word of Mouth, retrieved from, http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/ehost

Creativity a must for viral success

Creativity is critical for advertising because it has the power to engage and motivate people. 

Therefore, when planning a viral campaign creativity is a critical ingredient to drive success.

The problem with creativity it is highly subjective, making it hard to evaluate.  

Picture this…. your advertising agency pitches a BIG IDEA to you, your marketing team and your Chief Executive Officer.  They say, “this is a big creative idea that we think will be hugely successful”.  

But you're not sure.... it's really an 'out there' concept.  

But, your boss doesn't like it and wants to reject the idea!

Do you - reject the idea because, after all your boss is right? Or do you evaluate it against a set of criteria and convince your boss that according to this criteria it is the right way to proceed?  Hopefully the later! In reality lots of companies proceed with advertising based on personal judgement.  

So what can you do to make sure this doesn't happen to you?

Let’s have a look at three highly successful campaigns that have generated millions of views.  For this purpose I have used audience reach as the key indicator of success.  Then I'll evaluate the ads using an advertising creativity predictive model developed by Stuhlfaut and Yoo, (2013). The model establishes that advertising creativity has four dimensions: novelty, affective, utility and humorous and a unique set of 15 characteristics.

Lets see how they stack up….

1. Three highly successful viral campaigns

  Dynamite Surfing (Quiksilver)

• With a reputed 10 million views a couple of months after the launch this viral advert for Quiksilver took the web by storm and did more to promote the brand than all their other advertising combined.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR_naKxLEPc

    Test Your Awareness: Whodunnit? (TFL cycling safety)

• In just 3 months over 3.8 million people viewed this video making it one of the top viral campaigns of 2008.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubNF9QNEQLA

 Cadbury’s Gorilla

• Another recent great example of a highly successful viral campaign was Cadbury’s. 2007 ad featuring the gorilla playing the drums and has been seen by over 7 million viewers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnzFRV1LwIo

2. Introducing the advertising creativity evaluation tool

Just to give you some background to the tool I am using.  In 2013 Stuhlfaut et al., conducted research into advertising creativity and developed a tool to evaluate advertising concepts.  Their research showed that highly creative advertising had four dimensions – novelty, utility, affect and humour and 15 characteristics.

• Novelty is measured by being original, imaginative, innovating, unique, new, surprising.
• Affective is measured by whether is emotionally engaging and likable.
• Utility is measured by whether the advertising is meaningful, persuasive, relevant, and strategic and memorable.
• And the final dimension is whether the ad is humorous. 

 3. The evaluation! 

I evaluated each ad and assessed it against Stuhlfaut et at’s., characteristics that predict advertising creativity.  For simplicity I placed a “Y” in the box if I believed the ad met the criteria of that characteristic.

As you can see by the results below each ad shared a number of similar characteristics, namely: imaginative, unique, surprising, likeable, meaningful, persuasive, relevant, strategic and memorable.

What’s more interesting, is that ‘Dynamic Surfing’ attracted the largest number of views and also hit the largest number of predictive characteristics.  The least successful of the three ads being, ‘Do the Test’, only managed to achieve 9 out of the 15 predictive characteristics.  However that was still enough to generate a significant result.

4. The insight

Creativity is a critical component for a viral advertising campaign to be successful.  You can predict, and or evaluate, the success of your viral campaign by using Stuhlfaut et al’s., creative advertising predictive model. 

So next time you are developing a creative brief or assessing a campaign consider using this great, simple predictive creative advertising model. 

Your campaign will surely be a viral hit!

Stuhlfaut M. W. and Chan Y Yoo., (2013), "A tool for evaluating advertising concepts: desirable characteristics as viewed by creative practitioners", Journal for Marketing Communications, 17 (1), 1-17.