Jan 29th 2010
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Loading ...Have you heard? How marketers use word of mouth
People pick specific facts when recommending products, but use opinion when they are slating them. Luke Greenacre outlines research that helps marketers understand how to tame the crucial, but notorious, word of mouth.
Conversations among consumers, or word of mouth, can be the best friend or the worst enemy of any marketer. Consumers will pick up your marketing message, apply their own judgement of whether it’s good or bad, and start talking about it with everyone in their life. But the sheer complexity of word of mouth can be quite intimidating, often leaving marketers with little idea about where to start with engaging with word of mouth as a part of their marketing communications.
While word of mouth can be highly complex, new research from UTS Business is developing tools that allow marketers to find patterns in how consumers use word of mouth. By understanding these patterns, marketers are able to predict what people will start talking about when they start trying to sell.
The research draws on both qualitative research tools developed with Lynne Freeman, and choice experiments developed with Jordan Louviere and Karen Kong in the Centre for the Study of Choice. Using these, it is possible to predict the type of information a consumer is likely to pass onto a fellow consumer.
The research suggests that consumers tend to pick very specific types of facts when recommending a product to someone, but tend to use opinion (and not facts) when they think a product should be avoided.
These differences arise from how a consumer feels a piece of information will help the person they are talking to. There is an instinct to communicate information that will influence a friend’s preferences towards what they think is the best option, rather than telling them outright what to buy and taking the risk of being wrong. People want to be helpful, but are very risk-averse when communicating.
We started to really see the power of the research tools when we tested them on a service offering of a higher education institution.
We quickly detected that the facts being communicated by consumers about the service always suggested its superiority in the market, something the associate had worked hard to achieve.
But the model also detected that consumers had a low opinion of one, seemingly small, dimension of the service. So small was this dimension that most players in the market pretty much completely ignored it. And it was this one low opinion that was prioritised for communication in most target consumers’ conversations. Needless to say, this triggered a major re-think of marketing communications strategy, with a lot of work spent on what was previously thought to be the least important part of the service.
These tools can even be used to understand how the type of relationship between the speakers impacts on what is likely to be said. Research is presently underway to explore precisely this. Preliminary results are already showing that when a relationship sours, word of mouth rapidly changes in subtle but important ways. And apparently people can be quite devious when they are trying to be unhelpful. A useful insight when asking for help from the expert at work who doesn’t really like you.
This swirl of consumer word of mouth can make or break a product. This is why it is so important for marketers to be able to understand and adapt to consumer word of mouth. With research tool kits like these, they can begin to do just that.
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