2. Session 1…
The structure of the industry.
Session 2…
The four P’s
(Price, Place, Product & Promotion)
Session 3…
The role of word of mouth and how to exploit it in the promotion of
products.
4. Word of Mouth
• A message passed from person to person about a product or service.
• People trust their friends.
• People don’t necessarily trust the adverts they see.
• Adverts give us the positive aspects of a product or service.
• Friends give us the truth about a product or service.
• People are friends with others who have similar interests.
• Word of mouth targets a higher proportion of potential customers than
advertising.
• Word of mouth can occur as the result an experience with your product or service
or following an experience with your promotion.
8. Word of Mouth: How and Why?
• It’s not a case of ‘Word of Mouth Vs Advertising’.
• Word of mouth and the spread of your message needs a helping hand. It
needs something to start it off.
• The starter for the spread of your message could be a customers
engagement with your product or could be a potential customers
engagement with your promotion. An advert (in whatever form that may
take) can act as that start point.
• The dream scenario is your message being spread without the need for
any form of advert.
• You want your message to be CONTAGIOUS and to go VIRAL.
• You want word of mouth to do that for you. But you need to give it the
start it requires to get going.
9. Word of Mouth: How and Why?
• Things go viral and become contagious amongst social groups regularly.
• But why?
• It’s safe to say that a lot of the things that have gone viral have done so with little
planning and have got lucky. Most of them aren’t even advertisements.
• Taking a scientific look at why things have gone viral previously can help us to
give us the best chance of helping our message go viral.
• This gives us a 6 stage framework to mould our message by for maximum chance
of contagion.
• It is relevant for B to C and B to B marketing (Something which will become
clearer when we look at relationship marketing).
• The framework can be applied to products and services and was developed by
looking at the factors that made online articles, videos, pictures etc. go viral over
the past few years.
12. S ocial Currency
• Status through association.
• People like to look smart, clever, funny, cool and in-the-know and they like to be
seen as ‘ahead of the curve’ and at the forefront of new movements and
phenomena.
• They will talk about and spread the message of anything that makes them feel
like it will portray them positively to others.
• People want to talk about things that make them look good, not bad.
• If your product/service or it’s message can do those things there’s a good chance
people who’ve engaged with it will pass it on.
13. T riggers
• People talk about things that are on the top of their mind.
• If you can link your product to something they are likely to think about regularly
then they are more likely to think of your product and to share things regarding
your product.
• Strawberries and…
• Have a break, have a…
• Triggers offer us the answer for the Cheerios Vs Disneyworld question. Which has
the greater number of triggers?
14. E motion
• When we care, we share.
• High arousal emotions – like excitement, anger and awe fire people up.
• This activation, in turn, drives them to share.
15. P ublic
• A message which is built to show is built to grow.
• People often imitate others. Or at least others who we perceive to have qualities
or an appearance that we desire.
• But you can’t imitate what you can’t observe.
• Making the behaviors associated with your product public enables those around
the behavior to be influenced.
• How have Apple made using their products overtly social?
16. P ractical Value
• News you can use.
• People care about those close to them and as such will share information that
has practical value.
• Whether that is rgarding saving money, saving time or making them healthier.
• If your product/service, or just its message from your advert/promotion includes
practical value it vastly increases the chances that the information will be shared.
• If your product is attached to that piece of information then your product or your
message will be shared along with it.
17. S tories
• Stories are much more memorable than facts and figures about a product. (We
saw this last week. ‘How’ and ‘What’ are often tedious. ‘Why’ tells a story.)
• Stories are like Trojan horses.
• If your message or advert tells a good story, people will want to tell others about
it.
• When they tell someone the story, your product/service/brand/message comes
along for the ride and is shared as well.
• Remember, people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it!
• Sell your story and your product comes along for the ride when people share the
story.
18. Examples of Virality
• So let’s look at some examples of how others have created messages that have
gone viral.
• These aren’t necessarily adverts or marketing messages but they are practical
examples of how the six factors of contagion actually allow things to go viral.
• Some of these hit lucky, but with our STEPPS framework we can be more
systematic about creating our message and hopefully replicate their virality.
• We’ll look at 7 examples of successful messages which have been shared and
passed on by word of mouth. For each one we’ll asses which factor or factors of
the STEPPS model affected the success of each example.
26. Volkswagen, the force and the remote starter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R55e-uHQna0
E motion
S tories
27. Practical Use of STEPPS for Word of Mouth
So, yes, you need, to a certain extent, to be creative to exploit theses six factors…
but…
…by boiling down why things go viral to the six factors we’ve discussed today it
gives even those of us who aren’t creative the chance to create something that
goes viral, hopefully carrying your products message along with it.
28. Your task for next week
Pick an organisation and a product or service from within the Sport and Leisure Industry
that interest you. If you would like to to you create your own fictional organisation and
product you may.
Then plan a promotion for your product that looks to make the product and/or its
message go viral. You can do this in any advertising format you wish i.e
video, poster, picture, etc. (If your plan is to create a video then create a storyboard so
you can visualise your idea.)
You don’t actually have to make the advertisment, just plan it and be prepared to talk
about it, its ability to be contagious and why next week.
The simpler, the better!
Why run 50 adverts or display 50 different posters if one (or zero!) will do a better job of
sparking others into spreading it my word of mouth (doing your job as a marketer for
you!).
Give your message the best chance of being contagious and going viral by employing as
many of the factors from the STEPPS model as possible.
