In a column for forbes.com, Jack Trout takes on word-of-mouth marketing (click here to read). Trout claims that word-of-mouth is not all that it’s cracked up to be. He highlights the ‘danger’ of word-of-mouth. I quote:
No product in memory got as much buzz and PR as the Segway gyroscopic scooter. The problem is that most of the buzz was negative. "Funny looking or dangerous on sidewalks" is not what you want to hear. Buzz can kill you if you don't have the right product. The very expensive movie King Kong was a bust because of a lot of negative word-of-mouth. "Too long, too loud and overdone." The Pontiac G6 giveaway on Oprah got a lot of buzz but the car died at the box office. People would take one for free, but not if they had to pay for it. You've got to have a product or service people want to talk about in a positive way, and there aren't many of these around.
Now for the really bad news. There's no way to control that word-of-mouth. Do I want to give up control and let consumers take over my campaign? No way. They aren't getting paid based on how many widgets get sold. If I go to all this trouble developing a positioning strategy for my product, I want to see that message delivered. Buzz can get your name mentioned but you can't depend on much else. Not too many mouths will do a stand-up commercial about your product vs. its competitor. Nor will they check with you in advance on what to say.
I couldn’t come up with a better way to articulate the problem with industrial-age sales and marketing if I worked on it for 100 hours. Thinking like this is exactly why executives of growth companies need to be extraordinarily careful of what they read and who they listen to. Jack’s problems with word-of-mouth are: a) you can’t control it, and b) it may be right. It is, in fact, these two factors that make word-of-mouth the effective tool it is. Let me be clear – if you have a bad offering, it should fail, the faster the better.
Do you believe in your product? Can it stand on its own? Or do you need to manufacture the message? By the way, Jack misses a key point -- You don’t have a choice about word-of-mouth marketing – it’s happening with or without you. The only question is, do you embrace it or fight it?
I am a fan of Jack Trout. I’ve read several of his books and his thoughts on positioning have been very helpful to me and my clients. This is just an example of how badly industrial age thinking misses the point when it comes to the way the market place works in the new information age we live in. We’re all entitled to a bad day, I hope this is his.
PS. As I was writing this, my RSS reader delivered an excellent post on this same topic from one of my favorite bloggers. John Moore has some great thoughts on this.