Created by Bader Rutter as part of the Fast Forum series

A New EraWord-of-Mouth

for

Does Your Brand Get It?

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Old-school marketing is the price for being unimaginative. It relies too heavily on management of manicured messages that tell customers what to think about your brand and banks on buying attention with volume and frequency.

This model’s days are numbered. In the digital age, messages served by a brand aren’t as believable when online customer ratings and peer reviews will tell the real story, as told by real people.

Success is creating experiences worth sharing.

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of word-of-mouth is sparked by advertising.

percentOnly

The rest is something else.

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So what does a brand need to do to realize true potential? Change the game. Compel customers to talk about you because they love the experience they have with your brand. In turn, customers are more inclined to reward you with a review, pin, like or share. Before you know it, their peer network knows about you and the phone starts ringing — a big reward for doing nothing more than giving customers an experience worth sharing.

Ready to see how word-of-mouth can work for you?

What you’ll get:Greater

understanding of why delivering

memorable experiences is good business

See brands that are creating an advantage with word-of-mouth

Ideas for getting people talking

about your brand

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No one shares an average customer experience.

130

People have an average of

Facebook® friends.

At its most basic level, word-of-mouth is the story your customers share with peers about their experience with your brand. The marketing part is when you intentionally focus on providing customers an experience worth sharing.

Facebook is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.

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Social media now empowers a consumer who has had a remarkable experience to reach hundreds of followers. Likewise, studies show that customers will share a negative experience with more peers than a positive one. These facts make word-of-mouth more important than ever because conversations about your brand move faster and to a much larger group today.

Studies show that customers will share a

negative experience with more peers than a

positive one.

Word-of-mouth marketing is not a new concept. Restaurants are famous for relying on peer recommendations. BtoB marketers are now in a service economy where, just like in restaurants, product features aren’t enough. It’s increasingly difficult to sustain a position of actual product differentiation. A longer-term approach is to act differently by providing memorable experiences that spark word-of-mouth.

Marketers who don’t focus on providing meaningful customer experiences won’t get talked about — no matter how many tweets, ads and direct mail you send. If it’s average or boring, it’s not worth sharing and it’s a lost opportunity for the brand to differentiate.

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Word-of-mouth is really very easy to understand. If people like your work and trust you, they will tell their peers to do business with you. The recipe is the same as building any solid relationship: participate, rectify, engage, entertain, satisfy, support and surprise.

So why doesn’t your marketing team have a focus on word-of-mouth right now? Control. When a brand puts out a marketing message, whether it’s contained within an online ad or a direct mail piece, marketers are in control of the message. When you’re allowing customers to talk about your brand, you have to trust that they’ll say what you want — something with which traditional marketers often struggle.

Take command of the customer experience.

Client story: Make it memorable and extend it online.

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Plus, it’s relatively easy to put together an email marketing campaign, but it’s much more difficult to influence someone’s experience and reactions, for many reasons. • Marketers don’t traditionally have influence over

service and sales interactions.• Asking for a customer experience budget isn’t easy.• Marketers have to re-evaluate the role of familiar

mass channels.

Marketers who successfully gain some command of other touch points create a huge advantage for their brands. Word-of-mouth is an untapped opportunity for most, and simply focusing on creating more shareable customer experiences helps move the brand forward through differentiation.

80%of word-of-mouth happens offline.

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Is there something your brand can’t avoid doing well?Influence what people say about your brand when you’re not there by leveraging what you naturally do differently or better than your competition. Note that this shouldn’t be focused on a product feature because your product doesn’t need to be different to act differently. It’s all about: • Your brand personality • How you interact with customers • Your unique tone in the marketplace

Leverage what you already do better.

Thousands of FREE YouTube® views for flight safety instructions and beef jerky.

Your brand isn’t too boring to spark

word-of-mouth.

YouTube is a registered trademark of Google Inc.

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Southwest Airlines is a great example of this. It does service better and it has woven shareable experiences into multiple customer touch points. It allows its flight attendants to get creative, whether that’s by rapping the in-flight instructions or adding a little dance to the seat belt and life vest demonstrations.

Southwest Airlines extends its unique experiences beyond customer service by getting on the customer’s side with “Bags Fly Free” and by putting the word LUV next to its airline acronym SWA on the Departures monitor. Its stock symbol is NYSE:LUV.

Unique advertising also can spark word-of-mouth. The “Messin’ With Sasquatch” campaign by Jack Link’s® Beef Jerky offers an entire experience for snackers, complete with television commercials, events such as “Sasquatch Sightings,” an online game and a Six Flags® roller-coaster ride.

Jack Link’s

Southwest Airlines

Jack Link’s is a registered trademark of Link Snacks, Inc.Six Flags is a registered trademark of Six Flags Theme Parks Inc.

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“I would make sure that it’s over the top. You want to create

an experience, not just an event, to give them something they can take home and

remember for the rest of their lives.”- Greg Cannon, Mycogen Seeds

Overdo and overdeliver.

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Going above and beyond expectations is one way to get noticed by your customers and ensure the chatter about their experience is shared with peers. Now, there’s no need to overdo everything. In fact, the simpler, the better. Break the routine by changing your packaging, service or a customer event.

Maker’s Mark, for example, treats its customer like old friends in everything it does. These friends then have the chance to act as ambassadors for the brand and receive a variety of special perks, such as their name on a barrel of bourbon and the ability to track their barrel’s progress.

Anything that breaks routine is a good candidate for word-of-mouth.

Maker’s Mark

Sendik’s Bag

Sendik’s, a local specialty grocery, offers distinctive and durable red bags that are useful long after carrying food items home. As a result, every customer has the potential to be a walking billboard.

Our client Mycogen Seeds also has done a fantastic job of creating a peer event and online community that fosters conversations among customers and prospects — all without a push from sales. It adds over-the-top elements to its customer events by taking participants to a Monday Night Football® game or having a quirky, custom Mycogen Seeds song sung to the tune of “Rocket Man.”

Monday Night Football is a registered trademark of National Football League.

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Provide an experience that’s truly worth sharing.

unexpectedly deviant.

It has to be

Customers expect great products and services, so you must find a way to be unexpectedly deviant or clever. Ask yourself, “Would anyone share this experience?” If it doesn’t challenge what’s normal, chances are no one will want to talk about it.

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For example, our senior digital strategist, Grant Thekan, expects that when he stays at a Four Seasons hotel, the staff will be helpful. However, during a recent stay in Chicago, he didn’t expect a housekeeper to go above and beyond by brushing his daughter’s American Girl® doll hair, putting her in her pajamas and gently tucking her into bed. It was a moment that truly delighted his daughter and compelled him to tell his peers about the extra special effort. The Four Seasons gets it.

Even though a hotel seems like the perfect place for word-of-mouth, you should never think your product is too mundane for this type of experience. BtoB company WindsorOne sells lumber to builders and puts T-shirts with funny slogans in every shipment. Customers can’t wait to open another box!

Any change or challenge to the norms will be found as weird by a few. That’s exactly what makes them shareable! Here are a few ways to be more shareable:• Recast the rules of the marketplace. Think

“Bags Fly Free.”• Find the edges of customer service and take

things further.• The pleasantly unexpected is definitely

shareable.• Build marketing into the customer experience

versus just surrounding the product with it.

Take a fresh look at your shareability.

Never think

your product is too mundane for this type of

experience.

American Girl is a registered trademark of American Girl, LLC.

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Today, real online product reviews and social media comments trump marketing messages, and media consumption is at the point of saturation. Because of these unique challenges, word-of-mouth marketing may be the answer for your brand. It’s an untapped opportunity for many.

Word-of-mouth pays.

$10

For every dollar we’ve spent, we average a

return.

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Word-of-mouth forces you to focus on making decisions that are good for your customer first, and it makes understanding and improving your customer touch points a priority. Let word-of-mouth marketing be the catalyst for a conversation about customer satisfaction metrics, like the Net Promoter® Score, which is based on one question: “How likely is it that you would recommend this to a friend or colleague?”

People are now putting a higher value on honesty and transparency. Provide that by letting your customers help you tell your story. Invest in experiences worth sharing, and you’ll activate the most compelling message and medium you have — your customers!

Client story: Word-of-mouth can work very quickly.

“How likely is it that you would

recommend this to a friend or colleague?”

Net Promoter is a registered trademark of Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

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Check out these great word-of-mouth examples from brands that get it.• Krispy Kreme gives its customers a reason to share their experience by providing

a behind-the-scenes look at how its donuts are made.

• Southwest Airlines lets bags fly free, something airline passengers are sure to tell their fellow travelers.

• Virgin America’s safety video has 600,000+ views.

• Sendik’s, a local specialty grocer, turns customers into walking billboards by offering durable red bags that customers will be sure to use again and again.

• Maker’s Mark treats all of its customers like friends by offering an ambassador program and hands-on tours.

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These word-of-mouth resources inspired us.Links:

WordofMouth.org

Word of Mouth Marketing Crash Course

We enjoyed expounding on the opinions aggregated in this publication from other word-of-mouth leaders, events we have attended and our experiences in helping our clients find success. If you are inspired to read more about these topics, check out the recommended reading list. The authors are all amazing minds who “get it” and share wonderful ways to spark conversation.

Reading List:

1. Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking

2. Conversational Capital: How to Create Stuff People Love to Talk About

3. Purple Cow, New Edition: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

4. Everything I Know About Business I Learned From the Grateful Dead: The Ten Most Innovative Lessons From a Long, Strange Trip

5. Marketing Lessons From the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn From the Most Iconic Band in History

6. Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

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Thank you to Greg Cannon for sharing his word-of-mouth story.

Shot on location at General Mitchell International Airport, Miller Park and Bader Rutter HQ by the BR video team.