The most searched for word on the internet is “pizza”…So gentlemen “don’t believe what you think” and ladies “don’t believe what you think we think!!!”. In fact Google generously give access to all the ‘hot topics’ for any week here: http://www.google.com/trends
Did you know the fastest growing franchise in America is in fact a pizza company using Advocate marketing. They have gone from 1 store to 450 stores in 2 years.
Advocate Marketing can be used in different ways, depending on the company. You have to match your culture, your willingness to work with Advocates with their willingness to work with you. You can get to these levels by working up the Advocate evolutionary triangle.
We’ll be talking about that next week. In the meantime if you want to know the ‘hot topics’ of the week go here. Would you like your brand, service or organisation to be one of them?
It is full of gems like “black music that is no longer considered cool by black people.”
This week’s WOM thought. Cool products make people talk. These extra long Converse boots are a novelty and the shoes attached are designed by Architects. As we discussed recently in a world of increased parity – it is often the ‘little extras’ that make so much difference and often they aren’t hard to do. Not all of us work in companies that will produce ‘one offs’ or stuff that is outside the ‘market norms’. So we have to find a way to put a twist on what we’ve got.
Here are some examples. There is a cafe in Kingsland New Zealand which is called ‘The Fridge’. It does ‘nice food’, has a ‘nice environment’ and reasonable service but what stands out is they let people write messages on lolly sticks and put them on the wall. People say ‘is that the ‘lolly stick cafe’? Here is another simple example. Carly is an ophthalmologist, when children come and do an eye test with her they leave with a print of a dinosaur on their hands. Why don’t opticians do that? The cost is $2 – it’s a little touch that will have kids talking all day.
And for next week an example that will blow your mind. A bank has instituted a buddy system. A buddy will come and help you out with anything – from shopping to DIY at no extra cost – they can be summoned by touching an application on your phone. Who says banks can’t innovate to create WOM.
And if they can, my dear reader, you have nowhere to hide and no excuses.
We saw a great Irish comedian on a flight. He said, and it doesn’t work as well without the timing etc but you’ll get the picture – “Saturday is next to Sunday. That’s wrong bad planning. Why put the two shi****iest days of the week next to the worse one, Monday. It should be Saturday Thursday Monday Sunday Tuesday Friday Wednesday…” It made us smile.
We flew down to Wellington (capital of NZ) and volcanic ash from a Chilean volcano was blocking flights. This is what people were saying about a local budget airline:
“They’re f***king crap. They don’t tell you what’s going on, they don’t have a separate desk and they’ve got two staff on.” Strong Referrals have a statement followed by 3 pithy reasons why. Most corporate people write an essay when asked to what they think is being said about them. This is a great referral from one of the attendees on a course. Model answer. (Not quite word for word – we don’t have the post it here but nearly.)
“Emirates are comfortable – the most modern plane fleet, huge leg room & stunning International food. “
Go and talk to your customers. Your Referral won’t be this “They do premium insurance products…they truly understand me, my world and the context of my International perspective. This new easy as a go you package truly meets my needs. My key drivers are efficiency, connectivity & protectivity articulated by a giant cactus singing inside a broken piano which can only be smashed by a spanner which is singing “ok start her up”.
Because the stuff in red is as about as ridiculous as the way most companies think they are being talked about. If you get a line with statement and 3 pithy reasons – well, job done.
Focus gentleman & Ladies, Focus & ask yourself “What am I doing this week to keep people talking” – that’s the ultimate campaign plan – ask your agency how the ads will make your audience talk. It’s not just the “response” that matters but what they say.
Todd McLeay CEO of The New Zealand Lotteries Commission once said “The truth will out, you can’t force it.”
Common sense isn’t common. Some products are truly welevant – ie wacky and relevant. Take for example the Rug Mouse Matt or Naked Nude shoes worn by a client of ours. The shoes are designed by Architects. This sort of stuff is truly original. “Organic water” – is something you might talk about (for all the wrong reasons – how can water not be organic?) You get the point, if you have a bad product – fundamentally no-one is going to talk about you; period.
But these days there is lots of parity; product parity, service parity…so how can you make a difference? How do you create Word of Mouth in a World of Parity? Here is a clue.
How many Italian Restaurants have you been to? How many do you talk about? How many Italian Restaurants have a Ferrari collection in them (of models?). One! Is this hard to do? No, it isn’t. There are model shops. So how come he runs the only Restaurant in the whole of Sydney to go beyond great food, great service and a nice environment and has a Ferrari collection in it (the point is you have to go beyond great or good product don’t you)? So what is the answer, why the Ferrari collection?
The winning answers will go into the draw to win 1 of 2 “WOM Course Discount Vouchers”, which are 2 $500 course discount vouchers for the next WOM Marketing course we are conducting on Thursday 16 June 2011 (that is $500 off the $995 registration fee).
And no it’s not “be creative” or “find a point of difference” or stand out – it is in fact something deeply fundamental – all of those things are symptoms of the driving force behind generating Word of Mouth. What is it? You love it this thing – You seek it everyday – You give it everyday and it is the secret to creating on-going Word of Mouth – irrespective of what category you are in.
So? E-mail jake@thevillagesq.com and go into the draw to win $500 off our internationally acclaimed WOM course – crazy!
It’s Monday morning right? Well look at this wacky picture and smile:
Now for those of you who read this because you want to understand more about Advocacy read on, for the rest of you – every-time you find Monday is just too intense for you and you feel too many problems… we want you to turn to ‘Spock’ and say ‘what do you think?’. It’s been proven laughter makes you think better. So get SMOWSING.
Monday – well today with a client we opened a Magnum of champagne on a Monday morning at 9am. The reason? To make a point and the point was that a brand message (like an ad or like academically looking at glasses and saying that a beer glass and champagne don’t go together well) is less powerful than an actual real life experience. ( I made him pour a $175 dollar Magnum into a crappy pint mug, he could not bear it anymore after a third was full.)
Now it seems that everyone wants our e-mail address and companies are getting cunning at getting it. They increasingly advertise and want you to go to some uncorporate website named www.savemorefaster.com and leave out the NatWest, Rabobank or ANZ bit. What they might as well say is – we don’t care about you we want your e-mail address – you see messages can lie – they might be sincere but the more companies in general catch onto this trick – the more suspicious we become.
Here is the point. It is possible that as the internet becomes ‘more corporate’ (as it seems to be becoming) our level of trust in it and what’s said there will drop – as increasingly the ‘neutral source’ will lead to some corporate agenda. 98% of all the e-mail in the world is SPAM, look what we did to that medium…”History doesn’t repeat itself it rhymes” says Marc Twain…you get the picture.
And if the internet does get more corporate who do you think you’ll trust more than ever? Your mates and your girlfriends, your brothers, cousins and anyone you are close to. The real life experience of ‘your mates’ – will count more than ever. There are already sites like lifehacker.com that are starting to show you how to avoid technology and Telcos brands showing how you can re-route e-mails and calls to defend yourself against it… and brands like ‘Skull Candy’ make clunky old fashioned lookingheadphones to celebrate the good old days when technology wasn’t so intrusive or ever present.
So if the internet becomes more corporate then we’ll turn more than ever to Word of Mouth in the Real World for advice and help. ‘Gob advertising’ is the most trusted form of advertising and until we have cyborgs it probably always will be.
When did you last give your Customers a real experience? Time to get out the champagne then (and the beer glass )
Google are becoming consistently inconsistent. Almost every day they have a new logo – have you noticed? This is today’s:
Why do you think they are doing it?
Well we think it might be just one of their Word of Mouth Strategies. “Have you seen Google today?” Now this might seem a lot of work but think about it – every meeting is a moment to generate Word of Mouth for you or your company. You can, say, if you work for an insurance company or a service to service company – share interesting life statistics with people you meet. So have a think about it – if you are your Word of Mouth Strategy – what can you do personally to get people talking?
So here’s something to think about. This is the definition of spontaneity. 40% of all new New Zealand births happened ‘by accident’. It seems that among other surprising things we didn’t know – New Zealand is, after all, a good Catholic country – or one that teaches sexual education very unclearly. So now you know this interesting fact – see how many people you find yourself telling about it.
And if you do it illustrates the point. And the point is that Word of Mouth is about a little effort every day, a little care every day, even a little love every day.
The Google thing makes us smile – and we talk about it.
Great talk from David Brooks about the social animal. In this talk full of humor, he shows how you can’t hope to understand humans as separate individuals making choices based on their conscious awareness.
People talk about things that are different, unusual, funny, out of the ordinary and of course sex. They also talk about mistakes – now the sign below could be seen as a mistake – the point is you can really get people talking if you stage a deliberate mistake and then show it as a gag. Here is a sign which is, at least at one level a deliberate mistake. It turns out there is a whole science (Harvard Business School) on how to use deliberate mistakes to your business advantage.(Please read on)
This short e-mail will give you a story that was a genuine mistake made by a pompous,pious,perverted bishop from my own experience (It’s StartMondayWithASmile remember – SMOWS) and an example of how Absolut got people talking in the early days.
Surely they mean, actually we don’t know what they mean. There are a lot of these at www.engrish.com – funny misuses of the English language.
Here are two funny mistakes. I went to a posh English public school (Cornelis can tell Dutch tales so this is not one sided ) and one day the very nasty bishop (and he was nasty – in the paper subsequently for offences against choir boys, this is the one time it’s good not to be fancied…least if you are straight) did one of his extremely dull sermons, dull, dull, dull, dull that went on for an hour in a cathedral in England with 500 people attending. He then went to the loo and promptly left his mike on, the verger came in to tell him and of course there followed the open conversation:
“Bishop…”
“What the f****” do you want can’t you see I’m busy?
“But Bi…”
“Spit it out verger…”
“Very well sir….you left your Mike on”
Imagine walking back in and talking communion after that…which to his great credit – he did. None of us ever found him quite as scary again.
One of the keys to Absolut’s early success was ‘false parties’. They become the stuff of urban legend. They would leave notes for a party of a ‘whose who influencer’ – the person would turn up to a party – a very dowdy party and the person would think…this is lame…then a limo would turn up and take them to the ‘real party’. It emphasis the point doesn’t it and what do you think you’d tell your work mates on Monday? In London and New York such parties became legendary as more and more elaborate plots were made so that you ended up in a unique location. The final pre-party involved ferrying people to a private location via helicopter but you had to go through a range of deliberate mistakes to see if you were a believer to reach it.
So the point is beliderate msitakes can be a superb way to get people talking and hardly anyone can do it.
A surprise prize for the person who can think of a deliberate mistake another brand should make. Since idealog are so good at these, ideas, we challenge them to come up with one…..
Seth Godin argues the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant past: tribes. Founded on shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change. He urges us to do so.
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