It Blend? we need to find the inner remarkability. Like Foursquare or
airlines with frequent flier tiers, we need to leverage game mechanics. Like
Rue La La, we need to use scarcity and exclusivity to make people feel as if
they’re insiders.
The drive to talk about ourselves brings us back full circle to Please
Don’t Tell. The proprietors are smart. They understand that secrets boost
social currency, but they don’t stop there. After you’ve paid for your drinks,
your server hands you a small business card. All black, almost like the
calling card of a psychic or wizard. In red script the card simply says
“Please Don’t Tell” and includes a phone number.
So while everything else suggests the proprietors want to keep the venue
under wraps, at the end of the experience they make sure you have their
phone number. Just in case you want to share their secret.
*
Note that making access difficult is different from making it impossible. Sure, getting a reservation
at Please Don’t Tell is tough, but if people call enough they should be able to snag a reservation. And
while Rue La La is open only to members, it recently instituted a policy where even nonmembers can
get access by signing up with an e-mail address. Using scarcity and exclusivity early on and then
relaxing the restrictions later is a particularly good way to build demand.
Also be wary of how restricting availability can come off as snooty or standoffish. People are
used to getting what they want and if they hear “no” too much they may go elsewhere. Jim Meehan at
Please Don’t Tell addresses this problem explicitly by instructing his staff that if they need to say
“no” they should try to figure out a way to say “no, but.” Such as, “No, we are all booked up at eight-
thirty, unfortunately, but how about eleven?” or “No, we don’t have brand X but we have brand Y,
would you like to try it?” By managing the disappointment, they maintain the allure while also
maintaining customer satisfaction.
2. Triggers
Walt Disney World. Say those words to children under the age of eight
and just wait for their excited screams. More than 18 million people from all
over the world visit the Orlando, Florida, theme park annually. Older kids
love the frightening plummet down Space Mountain and the Tower of
Terror. Younger ones savor the magic of Cinderella’s castle and the thrill of
exploring the rivers of Africa in the Jungle Cruise. Even adults beam
joyously when shaking hands with beloved Disney characters like Mickey
Mouse and Goofy.
Memories of my own first visit in the early 1990s still make me smile. My
cousin and I were picked from the audience to play Gilligan and the Skipper
in a reenactment of Gilligan’s Island. The look of wild triumph on my face
when I successfully steered the boat to safety—after being doused with
dozens of buckets of water—is still family lore.
Now compare these exhilarating images with a box of Honey Nut
Cheerios. Yes, the classic breakfast cereal with a bee mascot that “packs the
goodness of Cheerios with the irresistible taste of golden honey.” Considered
reasonably healthy, Honey Nut Cheerios is still sugary enough to appeal to
children and anyone with a sweet tooth and has become a staple of many
American households.
Which of these products—Disney World or Honey Nut Cheerios—do you
think gets more word of mouth? The Magic Kingdom? The self-described
place where dreams come true?
Or Cheerios? The breakfast cereal made of whole grain oats that can help
reduce cholesterol?
Clearly, the answer is Disney World, right? After all, talking about your
adventures there is much more interesting than discussing what you ate for
breakfast. If word-of-mouth pundits agree on anything, it’s that being
interesting is essential if you want people to talk. Most buzz marketing
books will tell you that. So will social media gurus. “Nobody talks about
boring companies, boring products, or boring ads,” argues one prominent
word-of-mouth advocate.
Unfortunately, he’s wrong. And so is everyone else who subscribes to the
interest-is-king theory. And lest you think this contradicts what we talked
about in the previous chapter about Social Currency, read on. People talk
about Cheerios more than Disney World. The reason? Triggers.
BUZZING FOR BZZAGENT
No one would mistake Dave Balter for a Madison Avenue shark as portrayed
in the popular TV series Mad Men. He’s young—just forty—and looks even
younger, with downy cheeks, wire-rimmed glasses, and a wide-open grin.
He’s also genuinely passionate about marketing. Yes, marketing. To Dave,
marketing isn’t about trying to convince people to purchase things they don’t
want or need. Marketing is about tapping into their genuine enthusiasm for
products and services that they find useful. Or fun. Or beautiful. Marketing
is about spreading the love.
Dave started out as a so-called loyalty marketer figuring out ways to
reward customers for sticking with a particular brand. He then created and
sold two promotional agencies before founding his current firm, BzzAgent.
Here’s how BzzAgent works. Say you’re Philips, the maker of the
Sonicare electric toothbrush. Sales are good, but the product is new and most
people aren’t aware of what it is or why they would want to buy one.
Existing Sonicare customers are beginning to spread the word, but you want
to accelerate things, get more people talking.
That’s where BzzAgent comes in.
Over the years, the company has assembled a network of more than
800,000 BzzAgents, people who have said that they are interested in
learning about and trying new products. Agents span a broad range of ages,
incomes, and occupations. Most are between eighteen and fifty-four years
old, are well educated, and have a reasonable income. Teachers, stay-at-
home moms, working professionals, PhDs, and even CEOs are BzzAgents.
If you wonder what type of person would be a BzzAgent, the answer is
you. Agents reflect the U.S. population at large.
When a new client calls, Dave’s team culls through its large database to
find BzzAgents who fit the desired demographic or psychographic profile.
Philips believes its toothbrush will primarily appeal to busy professionals
aged twenty-five to thirty-five from the East Coast? No problem, Dave has
several thousand on call. You’d prefer working moms who care about dental
hygiene? He’s got them, too.
BzzAgent then contacts the appropriate agents in its network and invites
them to join a campaign. Those who agree get a kit in the mail containing
information about the product and coupons or a free trial. Participants in the
Sonicare campaign, for example, received a free toothbrush and ten-dollar
mail-in rebates for additional toothbrushes to give to others. Participants in a
Taco Bell campaign received free taco coupons. Because actual tacos are
difficult to send in the mail.
Then, over the next few months, BzzAgents file reports describing the
conversations they had about the product. Importantly, BzzAgents are not
paid. They’re in it for the chance to get free stuff and learn about new
products before the rest of their friends and families. And they’re never
pressured to say anything other than what they honestly believe, whether
they like the product or not.
—————
When people first hear about BzzAgent, some argue that it can’t possibly
work. People don’t just spontaneously mention products in everyday
conversations, they protest. It just wouldn’t seem natural.
But what most people don’t realize is that they naturally talk about
products, brands, and organizations all the time. Every day, the average
American engages in more than sixteen word-of-mouth episodes, separate
conversations where they say something positive or negative about an
organization, brand, product, or service. We suggest restaurants to
coworkers, tell family members about a great sale, and recommend
responsible babysitters to neighbors. American consumers mention specific
brands more than 3 billion times a day. This kind of social talk is almost like
breathing. It’s so basic and frequent that we don’t even realize we’re doing
it.
If you want to get a better sense for yourself, try keeping a conversation
diary for twenty-four hours. Carry pen and paper with you and write down
all the things you mention over the course of a day. You’ll be surprised at all
the products and ideas you talk about.
Curious about how a BzzCampaign worked, I joined. I’m a big fan of soy
milk, so when Silk did a campaign for almond milk, I had to try it. (After all,
how can they get milk from an almond?) I used a coupon, got the product
from the store, and tried it. It was delicious.
Not only was the product good, it was so good I simply had to tell others
about it. I mentioned Silk almond milk to friends who don’t drink regular
milk and gave them coupons to try it themselves. Not because I had to. No
one was looking over my shoulder to make sure I talked. I just liked the
product and thought others might as well.
And this is exactly why BzzAgent and other word-of-mouth marketing
firms are effective. They don’t force people to say nice things about products
they hate. Nor do they entice people to insert product recommendations
artificially into conversations. BzzAgent simply harnesses the fact that
people already talk about and share products and services with others. Give
people a product they enjoy, and they’ll be happy to spread the word.
WHY DO PEOPLE BUZZ ABOUT SOME PRODUCTS MORE
THAN OTHERS?
BzzAgent has run hundreds of campaigns for clients as diverse as Ralph
Lauren, the March of Dimes, and Holiday Inn Express. Some campaigns
were more successful at generating word of mouth than others. Why? Did
some products or ideas just get lucky? Or were there some underlying
principles driving certain products to get talked about more?
I offered to help find the answer. Enthusiastic at the prospect, Dave gave
my colleague Eric Schwartz and me access to data from the hundreds of
campaigns he’d run over the years.
We started by testing an intuitive idea: interesting products get talked
about more than boring ones. Products can be interesting because they’re
novel, exciting, or confound expectations in some way. If interest drives
talking, then action flicks and Disney World should be talked about more
than Cheerios and dish soap.
Intuitively this makes sense. As we discussed in the Social Currency
chapter, when we talk to others, we’re not only communicating information;
we’re also saying something about ourselves. When we rave about a new
foreign film or express disappointment with the Thai restaurant around the
corner, we’re demonstrating our cultural and culinary knowledge and taste.
Since we want others to think we’re interesting, we search for interesting
things to tell them. After all, who’d want to invite people to a cocktail party
if all they talked about was dish soap and breakfast cereal?
Based on this idea, advertisers often try to create surprising or even
shocking ads. Dancing monkeys or ravenous wolves chasing a marching
band. Guerrilla and viral marketing campaigns are built on the same notion:
Have people dress in chicken suits and hand out fifty-dollar bills on the
subway. Do something really different or people won’t talk.
But is this actually true? Do things have to be interesting to be discussed?
To find out, we took the hundreds of products that had taken part in
BzzCampaigns and asked people how interesting they found each of them.
An automatic shower cleaning device? A service that preserves newborn
babies’ umbilical cords? Both seemed pretty interesting. Mouthwash and
trail mix? Not so interesting.
Then we looked at the relationship between a product’s interest score and
how frequently it was talked about over the ten-week campaign.
But there was none. Interesting products didn’t receive any more word of
mouth than boring ones.
Puzzled, we took a step back. Maybe “interest” was the wrong term,
potentially too vague or general a concept? So we asked people to score the
products on more concrete dimensions, like how novel or surprising they
were. An electronic toothbrush was seen as more novel than plastic storage
bags; dress shoes designed to be as comfortable as sneakers were seen as
more surprising than bath towels.
But there was still no relationship between novelty or surprise scores and
overall word of mouth. More novel or surprising products didn’t get more
buzz.
Maybe it was the people scoring the products. We had first used
undergraduate college students, so we recruited a new set of people, of all
ages and backgrounds.
Nope. Again the results remained the same. No correlation between levels
of interest, novelty, or surprise and the number of times people talked about
the products.
We were truly bewildered. What were we doing wrong?
Nothing, as it turned out. We just weren’t asking the right questions.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN IMMEDIATE AND ONGOING
WORD OF MOUTH
We had been focused on whether certain aspects matter—specifically,
whether more interesting, novel, or surprising products get talked about
more. But as we soon realized, we also should have been examining when
they matter.
Some word of mouth is immediate, while some is ongoing. Imagine
you’ve just gotten an e-mail about a new recycling initiative. Do you talk
about it with your coworkers later that day? Mention it to your spouse that
weekend? If so, you’re engaging in immediate word of mouth. This occurs
when you pass on the details of an experience, or share new information
you’ve acquired, soon after it occurs.
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