Trustiness and Word of Mouth Marketing

Along with 499 other marketers, I’m spending a few days at the WOMMA Conference in Washington DC learning more about how Word-of-Mouth is evolving from being anecdotal to being actionable.

You can follow along, session-by-session, from the live-blogging posts on the WOMMA website. (There are a lot of posts to sift through as the live-bloggers are doing a bang-job capturing the gist of every session. You should take a few minutes to sift, as you are sure to find some worthwhile knowledge nuggets in all the posts!)

For me, the theme from day two of the conference has been TRUST. Every panel has touched upon this issue in some way. Gary Stein (AMMO Marketing) even titled his presentation Trustiness (… obviously riffing off Steve Colbert’s Truthiness seminal rant.)

In his presentation, Gary conveyed consumers don’t trust advertisers and advertisers don’t trust consumers. As we know, consumers have become distrustful and skeptical of fairy-tale marketing from advertisers. And advertisers are reluctant to trust consumers with the responsibility of creating and carrying marketing messages.

Gary sees trust driving confidence and confidence driving action. Ultimately, it is action marketers seek from customers so gaining/giving trust is of utmost importance in today’s marketplace.

Gary also sees the relationship between competence and benevolence as dictating the trustiness of someone or some company. Chewy stuff, eh?

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[Note: The “anecdotal to actionable” line comes from Andy Sernovitz’s WORD-OF-MOUTH MARKETING book. Click here to view money quotes from Andy's book.]

Comments

[olivier blanchard]

I haven't had the huevos to use the word in a client meeting yet (with a straight face anyway), but it's bound to happen before long. (Can't wait.)

[Tom Asacker]

Funny. I trust an ad more than marketing-induced word-of-mouth. At least with the ad, I know what I'm getting. Caveat emptor.

Trust = transparency. Marketing-induced WOM = instrumentalism.

[Gary Stein]

Good to see you John. Thanks for the links. I got some feedback on that equation, and will continue to evolve it. I was an English Major, remember, so no promises on the vailidity of the math ;-)

[Chuck Nyren]

I'll join the minority here and agree with Mr. Asacker.

When it all comes out in the wash, WOMM will be the best thing to happen to advertising. Pretty soon, consumers won’t believe anybody – even their best friends. They’ll realize that they receive the most honest and straightforward information about a product or service from a TV commercial, print ad, or product web site. At least we don’t lie about who we are and why we’re saying what we’re saying.

As far as all the noise about WOMM replacing traditional advertising – people who believe that don’t have a particularly firm grasp on history. Word of mouth marketing is nothing new. It’s been around since the beginning of modern advertising, morphing into various forms. The latest morph the WWW. Fine, use it as one of many weapons in your marketing arsenal.

Just remember this: Advertising didn’t die with the invention of the telephone.

An interesting article in Ad Age.

[johnmoore (from Brand Autopsy)]

Tom and Chuck ... this post on "trustiness" and WOM isn't saying that advertising is dead or that consumers should only trust other consumers. I'm a steadfast believer in Evolutionist WOM where the marketing is baked inside a product or service so much so that people want to talk about it.

As a marketer, I'd rather spend marketing dollars to make the product or service better and not to make the television commerical funnier. Doesn't mean I think conventional advertising should die. Also doesn't mean I believe WOM is the one strategy a marketer should follow. Every marketing strategy and tactic has its place and they should all work together to deliver results.

WOM is one way marketers can help go beyond trying to capture customer attention to garnering customer intention. WOM isn't the only way. Just one way. And the more gimmick-free the WOM approach is, the better. The less-gimmicky the approach, the higher the "trustiness" no matter if its a friend telling you about a product or an advertisement telling you about a product.

[karthick]

Dear All,

there is no Definite defination for marketing, the objective of marketing is to create awarness of the product/service to the people, and induce the customer to buy there product/service. in my perspective there are two types of marketing,direct marketing and indirect marketing. again in selling we have two types direct & indirect selling. if would like to contact me karthybabu@yahoo.com.
Regards,
Karthick

[Gerald Glass]

Karthy ... wrong message, wrong target, and wrong time. How good of a marketer are you? Really? How good?