The Anatomy of Buzz: How to Create Word-Of-Mouth Marketing - Couverture souple

Rosen, Emanuel

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0385496680 ISBN 13 : 9780385496681

Editeur : Doubleday, 2002

Synopsis

Book by Rosen Emanuel

A propos du livre

Extrait :

1.

What Is Buzz?

I first witnessed how buzz travels years ago. In 1988 I was working at a typical start-up software company in California: five people, four Macs, one PC, and a lot of hope. We had a single product, EndNote, a reference tool for researchers, and it was still a few months away from release. We hadn't advertised it. In fact, only a handful of people in California knew it existed. Yet we had just received our first order in the mail--and that order came from Princeton, New Jersey. All five of us stood around that purchase order, staring at it and trying to figure out how someone a continent away had learned of us.

Several months earlier I had joined the company's founder, Rich Niles, to help him market the software. EndNote is designed to help researchers keep track of their references and compile bibliographies at the end of their research papers. Not a very sexy product, I admit, but a very useful tool when you need to organize your research and follow the nitty-gritty requirements of different journals. Rich came up with the idea after he saw how much time his wife, who's a scientist, was spending compiling bibliographies. Every academic journal has its own protocol for the way they want bibliographic information organized. One journal would want a reference to look like this:

Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations. 4th ed. New York: Free Press, 1995.

While another journal would want it to look this way:

Rogers, E. M. (1995). Diffusion of Innovations. (4th ed.). New York: Free Press.

Even with a word processor, you can imagine how tedious this task is when you have to go through and make these changes hundreds of times every year. EndNote stores references in a database format and can display them in any bibliographic style.

When the purchase order we got from New Jersey came in, we called the customer who had placed the order. How had he heard of EndNote? Apparently one of the few people who'd attended a sneak preview of our product in Berkeley, California, several days earlier had been so excited about EndNote that he posted an enthusiastic message on an electronic bulletin board used by academics. One of those academics had just become our first customer.

Before I joined that start-up, I was a copywriter in an advertising agency, and in my mind marketing worked like this: Companies advertise, customers see the clever advertisements that copywriters like me worked to create, and then--and only then--customers buy the products. But this obviously was not what was happening with that EndNote purchase order, and in the following nine years I was reminded thousands of times that in the real world things operate very differently. Since that first order more than two hundred thousand copies of EndNote have been sold, and most customers have told us that they heard about the product not from advertising, not from dealers, not from magazines--but rather from friends and colleagues.

That's how I became interested in buzz.

After this experience I started to pay more attention to word of mouth. But I was still not sure how important it was in other markets. Maybe, I thought, word of mouth played a significant role only in the academic market or only for software? Once I started researching the topic, however, it became clear that this is not the case. Buzz plays a major role in the purchasing process of many products:

* Sixty-five percent of customers who bought a Palm organizer told the makers of this device that they had heard about it from another person.

* Forty-seven percent of the readers of Surfing magazine say that the biggest influences on their decisions about where to surf and what to purchase come from a friend.

* Friends and relatives are the number-one source for information about places to visit or about flights, hotels or rental cars, according to the Travel Industry Association. Of people they surveyed, forty-three percent cited friends and family as a source for information.

* Fifty-seven percent of customers of one car dealership in California learned about the dealership by word of mouth. "This is not unusual," says Jim Callahan of the Dohring Company, which conducts surveys for about five hundred car dealerships around the country every year.

* Every year we hear about movies such as The Blair Witch Project or There's Something About Mary that are driven by word of mouth. Fifty-three percent of moviegoers rely to some extent on a recommendation from someone they know, according to a study by Maritz Marketing Research. No matter how much money Hollywood pours into advertising, people frequently consult with each other about what movie to see.

* Seventy percent of Americans rely on the advice of others when selecting a new doctor, according to the same study. Sixty-three percent of women surveyed for Self magazine cited "friend, family or co-worker referral" as one of the factors influencing over-the-counter drug purchases.

And yet most of today's marketing still focuses on how to use advertising and other tools to influence each customer individually, ignoring the fact that purchasing many types of products is part of a social process. It involves not only a one-to-one interaction between the company and the customer but also many exchanges of information and influence among the people who surround that customer. Len Short, executive vice president of advertising and brand management at Charles Schwab, summed it up this way: "The idea that a critical part of marketing is word of mouth and validation from important personal relationships is absolutely key, and most marketers ignore it."

What Exactly Is Buzz?

A kid stands outside a school leaning against the fence. He's about thirteen, wearing jeans and a baseball cap, and playing with a yo-yo. He's good. A younger kid walks by, carrying a backpack that may weigh as much as he does. He stops. His eyes follow the yo-yo that now spins in the air in ways that would make Newton go back and check his gravity theories.

"Where'd ya get it?" the young kid asks softly.

The older kid keeps working.

"What kind is it?" the younger kid asks a little louder this time.

"Yomega," says the older boy. "The Brain."

"Brain?"

"They call it 'The Brain.' It knows when to come back to your hand. It's cool."

This type of exchange is the basic building block of buzz. I call it a "comment." When you add up all the comments made at a certain point in time about this yo-yo, you get the buzz about Yomega. In the end, buzz is the sum of all comments about a certain product that are exchanged among people at any given time.

Now, my definition of buzz is broader than others. Newsweek, for example, defined buzz in a 1998 article as "infectious chatter; genuine, street-level excitement about a hot new person, place or thing." This is a journalist's definition of the new: what's hot, what's attracting people's attention not just today but this very hour. Marketers and entrepreneurs, however, have a lot to gain from exploring what customers are saying about their products, not only when they are ultra new but also when these products are established. For this reason I've chosen to discuss buzz in a more general sense. Buzz is all the word of mouth about a brand. It's the aggregate of all person-to-person communication about a particular product, service, or company at any point in time.

People all around the world constantly exchange comments about everything, from golf to the meaning of life. Comments use many vehicles, but whether they move over phone lines, in e-mail messages, on paper, or over the dinner table, comments always start in one brain and end up in another. "Tootsie is my favorite movie of all time." This "comment" came from my brain and has just landed in yours. Billions of comments move between people in this way every day. Comments about relationships, movies, food, money. Comments in Japanese, English, Swedish. Comments that convey excitement, puzzlement, indifference, surprise. In this book I focus on those comments that are exchanged about products and services.

How Does Buzz Travel?

Buzz travels in invisible networks. To better understand what a network is, it's useful to think of a rough parallel: the airline system. Imagine that you're sitting in a control room where you can see all the flight routes in the world. On the large screen in front of you, all the airports are represented by dots (these are called "nodes"), and all the routes among them are represented by lines (these are called "links"). The first thing you'll probably notice are hub airports, which are the transfer points for numerous flights. You'll also notice some clusters in certain areas. All the airports in France are somehow connected to each other, and the airports in Japan are closely connected among themselves in a similar way. Of course, Tokyo and Paris are also connected to each other, so ultimately every airport in Japan can be said to connect with every airport in France.

Now imagine that you're in a different control room, but from this control room you see not the connections between airports but those made between people. All 6 billion people on our planet. On a huge screen (say, the size of a screen at an Imax theater) there are 6 billion little blue dots, connected by thin glowing lines. The huge diagram represents an information network that consists of established connections between people. These are the invisible networks. Here, too, there are hubs, people who are especially well positioned to transmit information. Here, too, there are clusters, areas where people are more densely connected to each other. And here, too, these clusters are connected among themselves, so ultimately everyone is somehow linked to everyone else.

As you look at this huge screen, you notice a constan...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

The first guide to creating the word-of-mouth magic that breaks through the skepticism and information overload of today's consumers, and drive sales--and profits--to new heights.

As Newsweek recently proclaimed, "Buzz greases the great conveyor belt of culture and commerce, moving everything from movies to fashions of the body and mind faster and faster."

Now available in paperback, The Anatomy of Buzz, written by former marketing VP Emanuel Rosen, pinpoints the products and services that benefit the most from buzz and offers specific strategies for creating and sustaining effective word-of-mouth strategies. Drawing on interviews with more than 150 marketing executives who have successfully built buzz for major brands, Rosen describes the ins-and-outs of attracting the attention of influential first-users and "bigmouth" movers-and-shakers, and discusses proven techniques for stimulating customer-to-customer selling–including how companies can spread the word to new territories by taking advantage of customer hubs and networks on the Internet and elsewhere.

Recent surveys show that 74 percent of young people rely to some extent on others when selecting a car, that 56 percent of moviegoers follow the recommendations of friends, and that 65 percent of the people who bought a Palm Pilot were inspired by the enthusiasm of others. With The Anatomy of Buzz, business leaders have what they need to reignite excitement about an existing product or service or turbocharge the launch of a new product.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Doubleday
• Date d'édition: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0385496680
• ISBN 13: 9780385496681
• Reliure: Broché