Marketers know that experiential marketing boosts sales and helps them capture customer data, generate trial, foster retail relationships and introduce products and brands. But there’s another reason for marketers to leverage live, face-to-face marketing experiences to reach target customers: simply put, experiential marketing drives word of mouth. And word of mouth is perhaps the most powerful marketing medium around.
Imagine an army of unpaid endorsers -- influential customers in any demographic you can target -- telling their friends, family and colleagues about your product, who in turn tell their friends, family and colleagues. The impact grows exponentially. A McKinsey study argued that buzz influences “slightly more than two-thirds of the U.S. economy.”
Word of mouth definitely influences purchase decision. Cap Gemini Ernst & Young asked car buyers what influenced them to buy a new car: 70% cited word of mouth; only 18% cited advertising. The Promotion Marketing Association asked consumers about the top influencers of purchase decisions: 48.5% cited word of mouth; only 27% cited advertising. Jack Morton recently asked our 360 subscribers to name the number one influencer of their purchase decisions: over 71% cited word of mouth, far more than a free trial (21%), advertising (4%) or direct mail (3%).
So how do marketers generate buzz? How do they get the right consumers or “influencers” talking?
Some marketers simply try to grab attention by staging news-generating, taboo-breaking events, an approach that may be effective but is an understandably scary proposition for many marketers, and one that’s arguably less effective for industries like pharmaceuticals and investment products than it is for entertainment or fashion. As The Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing author George Silverman tells Ad Age: “It’s like playing with fire.”
Other marketers are literally recruiting what Advertising Age calls “a stealth sales force” of influential consumers. Procter & Gamble has enlisted 280,000 teenagers -- 1% of the U.S. teen population -- in its Tremor group. Participants receive samples, coupons, incentives to win products and invitations to express their views on products and brands. They in turn talk to their friends -- marketing, whether they know it or not.
But generating word of mouth doesn’t have to be scary or complicated -- because it’s a key benefit of experiential marketing.
Even if marketers jump onto the experiential marketing bandwagon without word of mouth as a primary objective, it’s still a critical by-product. Even if marketers aren’t yet doing a good job of measuring the word of mouth that’s generated by their experiential programs -- and they should be -- it’s still a tangible benefit.
It’s not hard to understand why experiential marketing generates strong word of mouth. Imagine a consumer who’s engaged in a live, one-on-one marketing experience with a product they can touch and feel. If done well, the experience probably also integrates entertainment and definitely leverages a lifestyle association with which the consumer has a strong affiliation (sports, culture, music, etc.). Add that up and it makes for a memorable interaction. And the more memorable the interaction, the more likely someone is to tell their friends, family or colleagues about it.
Contrast a memorable experience like this with the following statistic: according to Nielsen Media Research’s 2000 study, “Unaided Recall of Broadcast and Cable Viewers,” at best only 12-13% of consumers who see an ad can recall it on the same night. If consumers can’t remember an ad, they certainly can’t tell their friends about it.
Marketers who leverage experiential marketing to generate word of mouth need to be passionate advocates of delivering not just buzz-generating experiences but good buzz-generating experiences. There’s an old saying that if you have a good experience, you’ll tell two friends, but if you have a bad one, you’ll tell ten. That’s incentive enough for marketers to ensure that they design experiential programs that inspire their customers to talk positively about their products and brands -- not just talk. Designing such experiences requires expertise and market research in experiential marketing at the same level marketers expect from their other agency partners. It's just one more example of the growing recognition of the high value and increased expectations for experiential marketing among today's top brands.
BUILDING BUZZ Word of Mouth a Key Benefit of Experiential Marketing - To learn more about this author, visit Liz Bigham's Website.
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