Marketing Insights

Buzzmarketing...a lot of marketers are talking about it...but few are actually doing it.

Why?

It’s new, it’s a very different way to market, and there are very few successful examples. So most timid marketers will sit on the sidelines, waiting until it has become so ubiquitous that it is no longer unique.

But that doesn’t have to be you!

You have a golden opportunity to learn more about how to implement your own buzzmarketing campaign.

You can learn all about the power of buzzmarketing and how to do it by attending this year’s ACTON Marketing symposium on April 8-10 in Charleston, South Carolina.

Our keynote speaker is Mark Hughes, CEO of Buzzmarketing and author of the book, Buzzmarketing: Getting People to Talk About Your Stuff.

Last week we introduced you to Chapter One of Hughes’ book, “Evading the Stampede,” which provides an excellent overview of buzzmarketing, including a list of the Six Secrets for creating buzz.

This month’s article begins our coverage of Chapter Three, “The First Secret – Push the Six Buttons of Buzz.”

Hughes writes, “What is great marketing?

“Aaahh, yes – identifying the holy grail.

“This is the question many CEOs and small business owners ask over and over: ‘How can we bring great marketing to our company and break out our brand?’ A marketer’s typical response is, ‘Let’s look at some of the best marketers of all time and duplicate what they did.’

“Follow this line and what happens next? You read articles. You interview professors. You find yourself looking for respected brands and may very well come up with Procter & Gamble as the model to examine.

“You discover that Procter & Gamble tests their TV commercials vigorously in focus groups. And before producing their final commercials, they test first draft versions (called animatics) for persuasion scores. They test intensity levels of media for these commercials.

“And maybe, like many others before, you decide that you’ve discovered the secret to great marketing. They wrote the book on marketing, right? Just duplicate what Procter & Gamble does, right?

“Sorry. It won’t work.

“Why? Chances are you don’t have Procter & Gamble’s billions of advertising dollars and resources at your disposal. Furthermore, Procter & Gamble hasn’t created buzz in a long while. They’ve been focused more on refining than reinventing.

“What’s the Secret?

“One of the secrets to word of mouth is that you’re speaking face-to-face, which gives you what tons of marketers are trying to get every day: attention. Face-to-face attention competes with no other media, grabbing undivided mind share.

“Another secret to word of mouth is credibility. When your friend, a neighbor, a coworker, or a family member tells you about a great movie, product, or service, you believe them. They’re not being paid to pitch the item and so you give them full credibility. That’s why having a great product matters so much: If you can wow ’em, people will tell their friends and neighbors.

“In addition to face-to-face attention, audio stimulus stays with you longer, providing superior memory retrieval. In a study of two groups, only 49 percent of people recalled advertising based on a visual cue, while 70 percent recalled advertising from a thirty-second musical cue. Given the right context of attention, audio stimuli can be far superior to visual.

“Why It Matters More Than Ever

“Why should you care? Not only is word of mouth ten times more effective than print or TV, word of mouth is more important today than at any time in the past, for four reasons:

“1. The ad clutter is rising to intolerable levels in America.

“2. Traditional forms of media are rising in cost, compounding the issue of clutter.

“3. We’ve been lied to so many times with advertising, it seems like the only message we trust these days comes from regular people like you and me.

“4. Technology is accelerating word of mouth.

“Because of technology, word of mouth is moving faster than ever before. Text messaging, e-mail distribution lists, chat rooms, message boards, Web sites, and blogs. If you see a great movie – bam, you’re sending an e-mail to sixty-three of your friends in an instant and you have the buzz currency of being in the know. If the movie stinks – bam, an e-mail goes out to those sixty-three friends warning them to save their money. You become a hero for saving all your good buddies $20 for a pair of tickets and popcorn.

“With BlackBerrys, Treos, Pocket PCs, WiFi, and WiMax, we don’t need to be tied to a desktop computer. We’ve got mobile communication with us for instantaneous messaging.

“Most important, though, word of mouth used to travel in unique settings where a conversation could never be heard again. Now, with the Internet, a permanent history of word of mouth stays recorded forever.

“Bad or good, the Internet has transformed word of mouth from a single-engine dogfighter to an F-16. It’s now become fast, powerful, long-range, and dangerous if you can’t harness it. It can be your biggest asset in today’s marketing world, or it can be your biggest nightmare if you can’t control it.

“But it’s so simple to say, ‘Just start a word-of-mouth marketing campaign.’ Obviously it’s not that simple to do. Flying this powerful machine requires knowledge, patience, and deliberation. Hang on.

“Basic Training

“The entire crux of word-of-mouth marketing is giving people a great story to tell.

“Why? Because most of us love to be the center of attention; we love to have something interesting, amusing, or novel to talk about, something others will find entertaining, fun to hear...and will
remember us for having brightened their day a little. Remember our definition of buzz:

“Captures the attention of consumers and the media to the point where talking about your brand or company becomes entertaining, fascinating, and newsworthy.

“A conversation starter. You’ve got to give ’em something to talk about because most of our products and services are simply boring. Law firm – boring. Exterminator – boring. Green beans – boring. Office supplies – boring. Computers – boring. Boring, boring, boring.

“If you want people to talk about your product, you’ve got to give them a reason to talk about your product. Give them a story, and not just any story.

“Take yourself back in time to 1984. On the day after the Super Bowl, can you imagine people talking about a computer? Watercooler conversation centered around MIPS or DRAM? Absolutely not. Boooorring! Apple Computer got everyone in America talking about its computer because it gave people a story to talk about.

“Not the product, not its attributes. People talked about that amazing commercial, about the audacity of poking IBM in the chest, about George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four, about the new era of Big Brother and how there might be a mini-microphone recording their every word at the watercooler right then and there.

“The story is not Apple’s technology, all its MIPS and DRAM crap, but Apple is at the center of the story, and Apple is the giver of buzz, allowing people to tell a story to their coworkers and neighbors.

“A buzzmarketer’s dream is to start conversations that begin with phrases like ‘You’re never gonna believe...’ and ‘Hey, did you hear...’ Yet within the context of these conversations, their brand rests at the center. The giver of buzz.

“The membrane of word-of-mouth marketing is that people love to tell stories – ever since the Odyssey and before, all the way back to the first tribal storytellers, the human race has been a culture around the spoken word, revering the elder who could grasp the attention of a circle of listeners and hold them spellbound.

“Remember Bonnie Raitt’s song, ‘Let’s give ’em something to talk about’? You’ve got to do the same thing. Give ’em a reason to talk about your brand. What you’ve got to do is create a readymade story for watercooler conversation.

“We did this with Half.com. It wasn’t an especially exciting product. Talking about a Web site that sold used and overstock books, CDs and DVDs isn’t exactly titillating – there were competitors in the marketplace doing the same thing, and no one was talking about them.

“We had to give people a reason to talk about our brand. We had to give them a ready-made story. Renaming a town from Halfway to Half.com gave the world a great story to tell, and it propelled us from a no-name Web site to a top ten retail site in less than six months. The better the story, the faster the spread of word of mouth.

“We talk about things that make us gasp, things that make us laugh, things that make us wonder, things that make us marvel. We talk about things that shock us, and things that thrill us.

“But why do we talk about these things?

“On the surface, we talk about them because they’re emotive and they’re interesting.

“But dig a bit further into the human psyche and you’ll discover we talk about these things because we want to be the center of interest. Imagine you’re at a cocktail party. Introducing interesting news gives you a certain currency. For example, being the first one to discover an unknown gem of a restaurant gives you currency. Introducing entertaining and fascinating news makes you entertaining and fascinating.

“And after all, who doesn’t want to be entertaining and fascinating?

“You’ve got to give ’em something to talk about – because it makes them interesting, and it gives them currency. Hey, Mr. Motorola and Miss Minolta, it’s not about you...it’s about them. If you don’t create a story that gives them currency...word of mouth will not spread.

“So you’re well on your way in basic training. There are a lot of buttons in the F-16 of buzz, but there are six magic buttons to push that produce currency and start conversations.

“They’re tried and true. I call them the Six Buttons of Buzz.”

In next month’s issue, you’ll learn about the Six Buttons of Buzz.

If you haven’t already acquired Hughes’ book, Buzzmarketing: Getting People to Talk About Your Stuff, you can buy it new, in hardcover for $16.29 at amazon.com. Used copies are also available.

Reading it before the symposium is an excellent way to get more out of Mark Hughes keynote presentation at the ACTON Marketing symposium in Charleston on April 8.