Remember when the Gold Blend couple getting together was big enough to be front-page news? That’s when people cared about marketing. Today people install ad-blockers to nuke every last atom of online marketing and social networks and search engines algorithmically sheep-dog retail marketers into ‘paid media’ pens where it costs a small fortune to utter so much as an audible bleat. Telly’s a no-go thanks to ad-zapping PVRs, on-demand and piracy. Print, sponsorship, stunts - nothing seems to work like it used to.
Perhaps there’s too much marketing now, perhaps not enough? But as marketers continue to plough the same old trough right down to the rocky bottom, ironically the answer’s been staring them in the face all along.
Once upon a time, back when people actually talked to each other, marketing was all about word of mouth. When people discovered a fantastic shop or product they told their friends and, sure enough, those friends headed down to the high street to check it out. That’s how retail giants like Tesco and M&S got started. Given only 10% of people trust advertising but 70% trust recommendations from friends, it’s pretty clear that fundamentally this hasn’t changed. So we need to go backwards to go forwards and put word of mouth back where it belongs: as our number one priority.
Luckily, while technology can sometimes make marketing more challenging it makes world of mouth infinitely easier. Innovative customer-get-customer solutions, by combining instant rewards, communal incentives and gamification prizes, give shoppers messages they can - and want to - share. Now retailers can stop marketing to strangers, hoping that some mud sticks and, instead, incentivise the people who already love them to get their friends, family and colleagues to start shopping, too.
To get a glimpse of what can be done, consider Costco’s recent gamified ‘introduce a friend’ programme that rewarded members who got friends and family to take out a new Costco membership. Sharing was made easy via a host of integrated tools for social networks, email or IM and members earned $20 worth of P&G branded goods for every referral. Successful referrers were shown on a leader board, with additional P&G super-awards awarded to top performers.
It’s clever stuff, but actually really simple. If you want more customers, the best place to start looking is at the customers you already have.
By Gideon Lask, CEO of Buyapowa.
PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.
comments powered by Disqus