DMNews recently published an article I wrote that discusses the larger strategic impact of inviting the customer voice to your site…
There’s a lot of buzz about word of mouth. It’s not surprising. Customers are exposed to thousands of marketing messages and trust each one less and less. Customers also are paralyzed by product choice: Search “Stapler” on Froogle.com and you’ll find 25,000 results. Naturally, we’re turning to each other to make wiser purchase decisions.
Marketing executives have noticed. CMO magazine reported that 43 percent of U.S. executives cite word of mouth as a top strategy for the coming year. But that doesn’t mean they know what to do about it. And it doesn’t mean that once they find something to do, it will stick.
Ironically, very few marketers actually are focused on word of mouth. Though the Word of Mouth Marketing Association has seen tremendous growth this year, the ideas and strategies of word of mouth have not seen the light of day across the entire marketing department.
How can something so important to a company’s success fail to get the attention of multiple functions? The problem is in the nature of a corporation and the nature of the topic.
Picture two cliffs and a gorge between them. On one cliff is the ostensibly right-brain ambiguity of “word of mouth.” We live this instinctively every day as customers, spending roughly 30 percent of our conversations spreading word of mouth and always seeking it out. On the other cliff is the left-brained, financially grounded operational process and systems that are the corporation. And we live on this cliff every day at work with our colleagues.
