Six steps of oral communication marketing

In the early 1980s, Trivial Pursuit was just a board game popular in Canada. Linda Pezzano, the late marketing consultant, revolutionized the way this product was sold. In the months before the opening of the New York Toy Fair in 1983, Pezzano sent notices to top toy buyers. Later, she sent the product to some Hollywood stars whose names appeared in the game, including Larry Hagman, Pat Boone and Gregory Peck, and the stars also responded positively. Their replies are used by her for various promotions. She also runs competitions in bars, restaurants, clubs and parks wherever she can. She does all this at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing. The traditional way is to spend a lot of money on TV commercials, movie promotions or licensing. Nowadays, the oral communication mode has been recognized by more and more enterprises.

In the early days of Celestial Seasonings Herbal Tea Company, President Mo Siegel attached a note to each box of tea, saying that the company was too small to afford the large advertising costs. He asked customers to tell their friends about the herbal tea. "We've tried all kinds of publicity, and we think word of mouth is the most effective," he says.

Many companies with great products use word of mouth to outperform the competition. Today, with the growth of e-mail, teleconferencing, online communication, and personal wireless telephony, word-of-mouth communication has become more widespread and has given new meaning to this form of promotion.

For buyers and sellers, word of mouth avoids the confusion and trustworthiness issues inherent in other promotions, and makes it easier for users to make decisions. It is ideal to do things well without any effort. Word of mouth actually involves others in information gathering, product testing, and taking the corresponding risks. This approach saves time, reduces wastage of resources, and reduces the risk of operating on your own. Therefore:

The best way to increase profits is to make decisions quickly;

The best way to make decisions quickly is to make the decision-making process easier;

The best way to make the decision-making process easier is to speak spread.

Word of mouth is more trusted than honest sales. It reaches more people, spreads like wildfire, and spreads much faster than advertising and direct mail.

More than credibility, speed and reach, word of mouth drives immediate action. Numerous studies have found that word of mouth is a trigger for buying behavior. In small talk among colleagues or friends, how a product is is often a hot topic.

Mastering Steps

Oral communication is like an accretion reactor. In ten people, if each has ten experiences, there are one hundred direct experiences. If each person told ten more people about their experience, the number of experiences would increase to a thousand. The rate of progression is amazing, it doesn't take long for everyone to hear about the merits of a certain product, which makes it more credible for the user to get the information because "everyone is talking about it" ".

In contrast, an advertisement printed in a magazine can only be seen by a small number of regular readers, and its exposure is limited to readers who read directly and circulate to each other. In this case, you have to turn to the mass media.

Driving word of mouth is a six-step process:

Figure out why users buy your product. Analyze the product from the customer's point of view and understand why the customer chooses your company's product instead of the competitor's. If you can't do this, you're not ready for word-of-mouth communication, and there are still many issues that need to be addressed, such as the product itself or the price of the product.

Identify the main market demand patterns - whether it is the pursuit of innovation, fashion, or acceptance of popularization, or outdated. For each stage of the product cycle, there will be corresponding demand patterns in the market. New products focus on innovation and fashion; while many products are taking the popular route, or even outdated. The purpose of identifying demand patterns is to clarify the direction of future efforts.

Identify the decision-making steps for the user to accept the product. Clearly describe the steps in a person's decision-making process when he is about to use your product? Influenced by what factors? What information does he need to know? What information can prompt him to make a decision as soon as possible? Generally speaking, the process of making a purchase decision consists of several steps that culminate in the actual demand action. Sometimes, one or more of these steps can become a bottleneck. If there are no bottlenecks, the product will sell very well, and even if the factory is running at full capacity, it will not be able to meet the strong demand.

Consider the first and second steps above, and figure out the key to each problem. For different needs, the decision-making process is different, and it is necessary to adjust the plan according to the specific content of the needs and its corresponding specific steps.

Establish persuasive and provocative messaging. Make a plan that, in a way you already know, will help the greatest number of people make decisions as quickly as possible.

Implementation of word-of-mouth communication. Before implementing this step, all that is done is preparatory work. Different media agencies were chosen to carefully organize the event, and different people had different preferences for rallies, conference calls, online events, and brainstorming.

Case study.

The following example is a good illustration of the above six steps.

A pharmaceutical company manufactures a drug that sells well, yet the company still believes that current sales are a small fraction of its potential sales. Laboratory animal tests have shown that the drug may have side effects, but in thousands of practical applications, side effects have never occurred in human cases. So the company decided to launch a word-of-mouth campaign to demonstrate that its medicines are safe and effective for humans, hoping to expand sales. They took the following steps:

1: Find out why users are using the drug: A series of surveys have shown that doctors have no doubts about the drug's efficacy, and many people have used it successfully. There's a phenomenon where doctors want to prescribe the drug, but they also need a stronger reason to use it.

2: Identifying needs: It is still difficult to popularize products, and research on popular needs is often a long-term work that lasts for several years. Products can have side effects, and it is not easy to eliminate such negative effects, and doubts will still exist.

3: Identify key decision steps: Bottlenecks may exist at any stage from trial to use, and the key step is to provide credit for the drug's safety.

4: Deliver what users want to hear: What doctors want to hear is that the drug is safe for their patients. Plus, if they are prosecuted for using the drug with serious consequences, they can get away with it.

5: Identify the most motivating sources of information: Respected experts in the relevant field are the best candidates to promote the drug. While publicity from actual users is ideal, and many are using the drug, doctors prefer to follow the advice of experienced experts.

6: Initiate an oral communication activity: In this activity, various meetings are included. At the meeting, experts will describe how the drug is used; what is the scientific basis for the medical warning; the fact that there are no single cases of the drug's side effects in the world; and the research that can prove the product works. They can even make the point that if the drug is not widely used, the consequences will be more harm than good.

After several meetings, the use of the drug increased 12 times.

The above case is actually a well-planned project, including research, to get users to make a decision as quickly as possible. The omission of any one of the links may cause the information to fail to spread.

Ineffective use of word of mouth is probably the most dangerous and unfortunate mistake in marketing. In fact, word-of-mouth communication can also be planned and controlled like advertising and various promotional activities, and marketers should not be surprised by this.

This article is reproduced with permission from "The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing: How to Trigger Exponential Sales through Runaway Word of Mouth" by George Silverman, copyright 2001. This book is published and distributed by AMACOM, a branch of the American International Management Association. All rights reserved. Translated by Zhu Jie.

The English version of this book is available from McGraw-Hill Book Co, Singapore.

George Silverman is President of Market Navigation, a marketing consultancy specializing in the promotion of word of mouth (WOM) campaigns. Originally a psychologist, Silverman has planned and implemented "WOM" campaigns for many well-known companies including Procter & Gamble and Merck.