In Chapter 1, I told you about the Academe of the Oaks, the Atlanta private school that was having trouble generating word of mouth. Part of the problem was that the school was offering a $500 reward to anyone who referred a friend, which turned out to be a disincen-tive to true influencers, who are loathe to be seen as salespeople. But having the school discontinue that practice was just one change we helped the school make.
When Academe came to us, the school was struggling to differentiate itself from other private schools in the area. The message it was putting out in print ads and on brochures was about small classes and personal attention. But these are the same things all private schools advertise. In fact, if you’re sending your kid to a private school, you probably assume it will provide small classes and personal attention. Our job was to identify what made Academe different—what made it talkable—and put that out into the community.
We didn’t have to spend much time with the folks at Academe before we found that point of differentiation. It was the school’s faculty. The philosophy of the woman who founded Academe was that all teachers should be experts in the subjects that they taught. That may sound obvious, but you’d be surprised by how many, say, English teachers in the United States don’t have a degree in English. Many teachers, even at private schools, have education degrees. All the teachers at Academe had proven expertise in their field; many of them even had PhDs. That was not only unusual among private schools but it was also a great conversation starter.
After we convinced Academe to do away with the $500 referral reward, we came up with ways to get the community talking about its teachers.
Academe adopted our suggestion that the faculty participate in trivia nights at the local burgers-and-beers joint. Each week, four teachers from four different disciplines formed a team called Academe, and the team competed against the locals. Naturally, they won—a lot. Others in the restaurant wanted to know who these people were and why they were so good. That launched a hundred conversations about the school and the superior qualifications of its faculty.
The Decatur Book Festival is the largest independent book festival in the country. Every August, more than a thousand published authors come to Decatur to read and promote their work. Starting in 2011, we encouraged Academe to forgo its usual booth at the festival and instead have students hold sidewalk readings of their own material. Clad in Academe T-shirts, students showed up with microphones on street corners around the festival and read or performed their own essays, poems, plays, or short stories. Huge crowds gathered, and at the end of each performance, the student said, “Brought to you by Academe!” to huge applause. They’ve now done this several years in a row, and it always starts tons of conversations among parents and potential students.
Following on the festival theme, we suggested faculty members compile thought-provoking quotes, mathematical equations, and scientific facts and write them in chalk on high-traffic sidewalks. They’d write things like, “What was Alfred Nobel [as in the Nobel Prize] famous for inventing?” Then a few blocks later, they would write the answer—“Dynamite!”—and they’d sign it with “Academe of the Oaks.” These were not only topics of conversation among festivalgoers but also games: some people would walk around trying to find every one.
We encouraged faculty members to participate in Dragon Con’s annual Saturday morning parade. If you’re not familiar with Dragon Con, it is a giant science fiction and fantasy convention that takes place in Atlanta every year. One of the most popular parts of the convention is the Saturday morning parade, in which attendees march through downtown Atlanta dressed in some of the craziest and most impressive costumes you’ve ever seen. Each year, a group of locals dress as the Periodic Table of the Elements. The guy representing copper might wear a police uniform (Get it? Copper?), while the lady dressed as francium would wear a beret and carry a baguette. We encouraged the teachers to join that group. Because the costumes aren’t always obvious, these folks tend to have a lot of conversations about them while they’re walking, and those conversations eventually wind around to a marcher’s professional life (because who exactly does something like this?). Lots of the people in and around that parade have a child or a friend with a child who is considering private school.
Finally, we helped train the parents. Taking to heart the lesson of the failed $500 referral reward, we brought in parents who would want to recommend the school to their friends and talked to them about how to share their stories. Again, no influencer wants to be seen as a salesperson, so we helped make parents comfortable going out and talking about their experiences with the school without feeling like they were being pushy.
After implementing these tactics, Academe found its enrollment outlook changing. It met its five-year goal by the end of the second year of our program. Getting in is a lot harder than it used to be, and many good students end up on a waiting list. The school is looking for ways to expand, possibly with more land or a new building. And all because it told a different story about itself.
That story was always there. But the school’s leadership couldn’t see it because they weren’t thinking in terms of story. They knew that it cost them a lot of money and headaches to keep class sizes small and that “personal attention” looked good in magazine ads. But it turns out that people do not choose their child’s private school based on magazine ads. They choose it based on what other parents are saying. Our program worked because it gave parents in the community something great to say about Academe. Picture yourself at a Sunday brunch. With you are people you know—a friend of a friend, a woman you used to work with, maybe your accountant—but not people you’re particularly close to. These people are all busy and naturally preoccupied with their own lives.
You’re going to tell them a story. Will it keep them interested? Will they lean in as you talk? Will they nod their heads and widen their eyes, flashing a little smile as you reach your conclusion?
Or will they start to look around the room before you’ve barely said a word? Will their attention wander? Will they interrupt in hopes of changing the topic? Will they ask questions not to learn more but to poke holes in your premise? Will they start a side conversation before you’ve had a chance to make your point?
The fact is that anyone can tell a story. The trick in word of mouth marketing is coming up with one that others want to share with people. Even if they did not show up that day to hear what it is you’re talking about.
This is particularly hard when the story is about your business. It’s kind of like talking about your own child. What you find fascinating can be glaze-over boring to others. You have to choose and craft such stories carefully, with your audience in mind.
If you’re going to share your story with influencers, you need to make it talkable. That’s a word we use at Fizz to mean, simply, something that people will want to talk about. Just because you’re talking doesn’t mean what you’re saying is talkable.
For a story to be talkable, it has to be three things: relevant, interesting, and authentic. Fail on any one of these points, and your story probably won’t be shared. Let’s look at each point individually.
Think back to what we know about influencers. Why do they share stories? Because they want to create or deepen their relationships with the people they are talking to. Influencers do what they do as an expression of love. This is why they maintain the largest possible networks of friends and influencees.
A true influencer won’t try sharing a story he doesn’t think is relevant to the person he is talking to. Think about it: Would you tell your mother-in-law about the enhanced game play in Call of Duty 4? Would that story help build a stronger relationship between the two of you? Her takeaway from such a conversation might be that you don’t know her very well and that you haven’t taken the time to consider what interests her. That is not how influencers—who, let’s remember, have strong social skills—work. If they’re going to tell someone a story, they are going to be sure it is about something that person is interested in, so it will strengthen the bond between them.
If it’s going to be talkable, the story of your brand has to be relevant to your audience. If you’re building race cars, you won’t get far talking about trunk size. Why? Because race car enthusiasts don’t care about trunk size. (Also, I’m pretty sure race cars don’t have trunks.) But if you’re building family sedans, a story about trunk size, while not inherently interesting, is relevant to your potential customers.
It’s remarkable how few business owners really grasp this. I know because, as I’ve mentioned before, I am occasionally approached by smart, successful CEOs and brand managers who want to start a word of mouth campaign about their company’s anniversary or some other internal milestone. Not many people are going to talk about those things because they are relevant only to you and your employees. For a story to get passed around, it has to be somehow connected to the lives of the people doing the talking.
A story has to be interesting so an influencer will pick it up and investigate it. There are all sorts of reasons that people may find a story interesting. But there are two particularly worth mentioning.
As C+C Music Factory showed us back in 1990, people love “Things that Make You Go Hmmm.” Some stories simply make you stop what you’re doing and consider them for a moment. Why? When you break it down, the “hmmm” factor can really be attributed to one thing: cognitive dissonance. Something challenges your assumptions, or it presents information in a way that doesn’t immediately make sense to you, and you find yourself going, “Hmmm, interesting.” For instance, shoppers in a mall see a uniformed person throwing toys and pine needles on the floor. They are going to stop and investigate that. (That anecdote will make more sense in a minute.)
People also pay attention to news—that is, information that is new or noteworthy to them, particularly about recent or important events. News is something you didn’t know regarding a topic that interests you or that affects you directly. If you can present people with real news, they will stop and pay attention.
Authentic stories are, by definition, true. But being authentic requires more than just telling the truth. “True” is the province of lawyers and public relations professionals. But for everyday people, it’s easy to spot the difference between a story that is merely true and one that is authentic.
When it comes to marketing, an authentic story about your brand or category is one that matches what I as a consumer think I already know about it. When we were promoting PBR, we did not try to convince people it tasted like champagne because no one would have bought it (the story or the beer). In that same vein, we never would have suggested that Crocs be worn as eveningwear. Influencers will reject your story outright if it smells artificial.
One of the reasons Martha Stewart is so successful—and so talked about—is that people sense that she really does decorate pinecones for her Christmas dinner table and that she turns doilies into durable baby clothes in her spare time. Those “tips” from any other source wouldn’t gain nearly as much traction. But Martha gets away with offering the most seemingly insane lifestyle advice because people can sense that is how she actually lives.
A good, talkable story is an authentic one. It’s real. If country musician Zac Brown tried to sell a line of sushi mats, he would be stuck with a warehouse full of them. And no influencer would be caught dead talking about them to his friends who love country music (see the nearby Pro Tip). But tell a story that is true to who you are and what people know about you, and it will resonate. That kind of authenticity is key to talkability.
Congratulations. Your story has cleared the first three hurdles. It is relevant, interesting, and authentic. Now, take it to brunch. Practice telling it to your preoccupied brunch companions. Literally practice telling them the story. How would you bring it up? What are the relevant points you’d tell first? What are the interesting tidbits you’d use to draw them in? Are they with you? If not, why not?
Remember, you need to be tough on yourself with the Brunch Test. Invite people who aren’t necessarily inclined to listen to your story. It needs to engage people who didn’t show up that day eager to hear what you have to say.
If you can honestly see this audience taking an interest in your story, you just might have something talkable. The next step is to find the right real-world audience for it. If you want your story to be passed around by people, you need to find the right people. You need to find your audience.
It’s a basic truth of storytelling: very few stories are interesting to everyone. The six (and counting) Fast and Furious movies have grossed a total of nearly a billion dollars in box office receipts worldwide. Yet there are millions of people you couldn’t pay to sit through a moment of these films. For some people, fast cars, hot women, and loud music constitute a perfect night at the movies. For others, they constitute a nightmare. It’s all about putting your material in front of the right people.
To find those people, ask yourself one simple question. Who really cares? Or as we say at Fizz, “Who gives a fuck?” Think about the story behind your brand or product, and ask yourself the question. When you have your answer, you will be on your way to finding your audience.
The use of the word “fuck” is important here. We aren’t asking, “Really, who cares?” We’re asking, “Who really cares?” A lot. It’s OK to target people who have a passing interest in your brand or product. But it’s far better to target those who are likely to be passionate about it. You know, those people who really give a fuck. They are much more likely to spread your story faster and further.
As I noted earlier, people today are better able than ever to group themselves according to interest. Whether in person or online, fans create communities around their passions, from muscle cars to spicy foods to rap music. Figure out who would be interested in your story, and you’ll have a pretty good idea which community you should be talking to.
Sometimes, finding your audience is easy and obvious. Selling a killer new car wax formulated specifically for antique cars? Get yourself to a classic car show and strike up some conversations. Got some ultra-stretchy workout pants to sell? To the yoga studio! As we discussed, beer festivals were practically invented as a launchpad for craft beer word of mouth campaigns.
But often, the products and services we sell do not inspire authentic communities of passionate fans. Sometimes, you have to think a little harder about where to find your audience, the one that will take an interest in your product and feel compelled to spread the word about it.
Brooms and vacuum cleaners fall firmly into this category. A few years ago, BISSELL hired our agency to spread the word about the BISSELL sweeper, a manual sweeper whose sales had been languishing. Communities of vacuum cleaner enthusiasts are, shall we say, thin on the ground. There are no vacuum cleaner parties to attend, no thriving online communities of vacuum enthusiasts. We needed a slightly more creative way to reach a community of people who would feel compelled to share the news about this new product.
And there was good reason to talk about it. This sweeper had a remarkable capacity for sweeping up small items usually left behind by vacuums and lesser sweepers—think tiny action figure accessories (swords, helmets, and so on), kitty litter, pine needles, and Lego blocks. If you have kids of a certain age, you know how annoying it is to step on Lego blocks. Plus, retrieving those pieces from the sweeper was far easier than retrieving them from the murky depths of a vacuum cleaner bag. Also, this cleaner didn’t have a motor, making it far quieter than any vacuum.
We knew we had to get this sweeper in front of moms with young children. For one thing, years of research told us that moms make most of the household decisions regarding cleaning products. And young kids are most likely to have toys with lots of tiny pieces. They also take naps, which is when moms tended to clean—as quietly as possible.
Lucky for us, it was Christmastime, and moms everywhere were waging war on the pine needles falling off their Christmas trees. (Bonus: January is the biggest month for vacuum cleaner sales.) But where to demonstrate how effective the BISSELL sweeper was against this menace? Christmas tree farms? Too far, and not really a great environment for the sweepers. Next to the guys who sell trees on the sidewalks? Not a great place to do demonstrations; what if it rains?
Then we thought, what about the Santa line? Santa sits in a chair at the mall, and the kids stand in a slow-moving line with their parents next to a velvet rope. And there is never anything on the other side of that velvet rope, is there? What if we threw a bunch of pine needles and toys on a carpet on the other side of that rope and staged demonstrations?
So that’s what we did, and it was a huge success. We had people wearing BISSELL shirts throwing all sorts of junk on a carpet from bags labeled “mess,” and then showing what the sweeper could do. The moms were intrigued, but the kids were fascinated. “Mommy, that lady is making a mess!” they’d cry. “Can I help?” And we ended up with dozens of kids throwing toys and pine needles on the floor, who would then take turns helping our brand ambassadors scoop them up with the sweeper. You’d have thought they were playing with the hottest new toy of the season. (I actually have pictures of kids crossing off items on their Christmas list so they could add the sweeper. I would have loved to see Santa’s face when he heard that request.)
You can probably guess what happened next. Moms whipped out their cell phone cameras and started snapping away. Their kids were already dolled up and coiffed to meet Santa, and now they were jostling over who would get to help the nice lady use the sweeper. Naturally, the moms posted these pictures of their kids on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Thus, word spread, in the most adorable way possible, to thousands upon thousands of moms.
That was a talkable story. Right place, right time, right audience, authentic. And of course, as the kids were playing, moms were asking questions about the sweepers.
In the five years previous to our campaign, sales of that sweeper had been flat, and the five years previous to that, they had been declining. In the first year of our campaign, sales went up 15 percent. In the second year, they went up 25 percent.
Our campaign worked because we figured out who our audience was—who would want to talk about this product—and where to find these people. It didn’t matter that they never congregated specifically to talk about vacuum cleaners. But they still existed as an authentic community of passionate consumers. We just had to figure out who they were, where to find them, and how to get their attention. That is the kind of storytelling that gets people talking.
Not all communities are created equal. Before you waste your time talking to a community that won’t help spread your story, you need to evaluate and grade them. To do so, rate them on four criteria.
The strength of a group’s communication is determined by the strength of the bonds between its members. Parents in a PTA will have strong bonds because their kids’ education is at stake. Union members maintain very strong bonds because their rights, livelihood, and healthcare are on the line. Veterans’ groups have strong bonds because they’ve been through wars together.
But plenty of people bring that same passion and urgency to their tennis club, or their Miley Cyrus fan club, because they, too, feel their very lives are at stake. When grading a community, look for signs that its members maintain tight bonds with one another, that they are passionate enough to hungrily consume and pass on any relevant information about the topic at hand. You want to be dealing with groups that communicate frequently and efficiently. Word of mouth doesn’t work if people aren’t talking to one another.
In 2012, Fizz was helping a giant U.S.-based telcom spread the word about its 4G LTE mobile Internet connection. The goal was to move customers from 4G, which had become crowded and sluggish, to 4G LTE, which was new and moved at lightning speeds. Moving customers out of gridlock and into the fast lane would benefit the customers, but it would also save the company money.
Our first job was to find communities that would care deeply about faster Internet speeds. One of the more surprising groups we came up with was hairstylists. Why hairstylists? For one, hairstylists as a community are very strong communicators.
Throughout their careers, typical stylists will work at dozens of different salons. They get to know a lot of different hairstylists, and they maintain vast, complex networks of colleagues and references. They are also a talkative bunch who love to share professional tips and news with one another. So when hairstylists spread the news, they aren’t just talking to the guy one chair over. They’re talking to their coworkers from two, three salons ago. It’s kind of a never-ending, citywide hairstylist conversation.
Photos are very important to hairstylists too. There are two reasons for this: One, because they change salons so often, smart stylists maintain a “lookbook” with photos of all their best hairdos. It’s basically a portfolio of their work. Of course, styles change quickly, so the stylists are constantly updating these lookbooks. The easier it is to shoot and upload high-quality pictures, the easier it is for them to maintain their book.
Two, stylists are frequently asked to re-create a hairstyle from the pages of a magazine. Customers tear out pictures of their favorite celebrity hairdos and ask stylists to replicate the look on them. But for the stylists, this can be a problem. For one, a single picture of a hairdo doesn’t necessarily contain enough information—What does it look like from the back? Or the top?—for the stylists to work with. And then there is the problem of color, as we found with women who wanted to look like the singer Katy Perry.
After Katy Perry divorced Russell Brand in late 2012, she dyed her hair an electric shade of blue—a small act of feminine defiance that resonated with a lot of women. Soon, customers were walking into salons holding pictures of Katy Perry, saying they wanted exactly that shade of blue.
Unfortunately, magazine pictures are not great when it comes to capturing true colors. Perry’s blue hair in People didn’t quite match her blue hair in Us Weekly. So these women walking in with the magazine clippings all risked walking out with slightly different color hair than they really wanted.
We gave a bunch of hairstylists 4G LTE tablets to use for a couple of weeks. Now, when a customer asked for Katy Perry Blue, the stylist could simply Google it and find hundreds of pictures in an instant. If someone wanted Jennifer Aniston’s haircut, the stylist didn’t have to ask, “Which one?” She could just search online—again, superfast—for the pictures. The speedy tablets also helped the stylists cut down on the time they spent uploading and editing photos for their lookbooks.
Word spread quickly among the stylists that this tool could both save them time and make their customers happy. Before we knew it, salon owners were coming to us saying they had heard about these tablets, and they wanted them for their own store. Those owners were so pleased that they equipped their whole shops with 4G LTE. Our client, of course, was pleased too. That was a great example of a tight-knit community quickly spreading the word about a relevant product.
But hairstylists don’t talk exclusively to hairstylists, of course. One other thing we knew about stylists from the beginning was that their customers put a lot of trust in them. In surveys where women are asked to name the people they trust most, time and again they name their husband first and their hairstylist second. So when these women saw their stylists using the 4G LTE tablets, they took that as a very easy and natural recommendation from a trusted source.
These hairstylists were not only good at telling each other about 4G LTE but they were also good at spreading the word to the larger consumer community. That’s an example of really strong communicators, even though hairstylists may not be the first group you think of when you hear “community.”
Flight attendants talk to each other during takeoffs or landings, or between beverage services. Bartenders talk to waiters having a drink after their shifts end. People in groups like these will spread information faster than those who need to go out of their way to find time to talk to one another.
When looking at a community, ask yourself, How practiced are these people at sharing stories with one another? Are there established routines among them for passing on information? Think about every cop show you’ve ever seen, when the captain stands in front of the force each morning and runs down the list of the day’s threats. Or nurses passing on patient information at the end of their shifts. These routines ensure that information will be passed on in a timely manner.
When thinking about this, it’s important to be open-minded. Not all established routines look like established routines. Once, a client of ours that made a platform for mobile payments wanted to reach out to vendors who needed to be mobile. We eventually settled on artists and craftspeople who were selling their goods at traveling street fairs. These folks were spending hour upon hour sitting in their booths as browsers came and went. And as they sat there, they would naturally talk to the guy in the next booth over, sharing stories, news, and gossip. It wasn’t quite morning announcements, but it had the same effect: information spread quickly among these folks because there was an established, recurring method of communication.
A community with an Internet forum that nobody visits is not really a community. So ask yourself, How well established is this community? Do its members meet once a month? Do they talk daily? Or do they share stories only when they see each other at conventions once a year? You want to work with communities that have a reason to exist beyond you. You want people who are showing up as often as they can because the more they show up, the more they will share stories.
Word of mouth is ultimately a numbers game—you need a lot of people to share your story, so a lot of other people will buy your stuff. It matters that these people truly exist as a community in spirit as well as name.
Members of an authentic community are there because they love the topic and they want to be around others who share their passion. An authentic community consists of people who would lose or spend money to be part of it if they had to. The more that members of a community are being compensated, the less authentic the community.
One of the most authentic communities I have ever seen is around the video game Civilization by Sid Meier. It’s a complicated game with a dedicated following. This particular online message board was started by a guy who worked for the Coast Guard and lived in Alaska. This guy had no connection to the company that manufactured the game, and he wasn’t, as far as I know, a professional gamer in any sense. But he was passionate about this game, so in his spare time, he moderated this board.
At first, people visited this message board to get tips and help for playing the game (as I said, it’s complicated). But as time went on, the board attracted so much attention from Civilization fans that it became a base for organizing meetups and tournaments. It evolved into the de facto Civilization clubhouse—all because people were attracted to the proprietor’s very real love of the game. Other players could sense that he took it as seriously, if not more so, than they did, and they knew that he was in it for the pure love of it and not any kind of compensation. It was an authentic community, and that attracted more and more people with a real interest in the topic.
That is just one example of an authentic community. The question is, How do we as brands and companies achieve the same thing on a regular basis?
If there is no existing authentic community around your topic or brand, you can create one. You just have to be careful about how you do it. It is completely OK to say to people, “We think what we’re doing is awesome.” The trick is to do it in such a way that you attract people who aren’t necessarily looking to be compensated for their involvement. Offer $5 off the next purchase for anyone who likes your Facebook page and you will quickly amass a “community.” But these are worthless connections because these people do not care about your brand. They care about saving money.
Craft brewers are masters at this. Read the side of a small-batch beer bottle sometime. Most craft brewers really, truly love their own beer, and that enthusiasm comes across when they describe their ingredients and brewing process. “Our beer is awesome, and this is how we made it that way.”
Here are four good rules to follow when starting a community around your brand.
You have to be honest, but not exhaustively so. Under no circumstances should you lie, but that doesn’t mean you have to divulge every detail either. Think of your community kind of like your ex. You can talk about yourself without oversharing. But you do need to be fundamentally transparent.
If your community starts asking questions about something you’d rather not talk about, you have to be prepared to discuss it. But that doesn’t mean you need to foster conversations about your secrets.
If you’re going to invite people to share their stories and feelings about your brand with you and each other, you have to listen to everyone. You cannot simply ignore some people because you do not like what they have to say.
You’re throwing the party, you’re sending out the invitations, and you have to treat all your guests with respect.
That doesn’t mean you have to celebrate every comment equally. The nice part about hosting your own community is you get to pick and choose to whom you’re going to show the most love.
Blogs such as Deadspin and even large publications like the New York Times have comment sections that allow anyone and everyone to weigh in. But the brands themselves (and the readers, to an extent) control which comments get highlighted. This is instructive for any brand-run community. Let everyone have his orher say, but don’t feel obligated to celebrate every comment—or commenter—equally.
Simply put, there is nothing wrong with simply showing your customers that you are as enthusiastic about your product as they are.
Of course, you genuinely need to be enthusiastic about it. It’s hard to fake being psyched about, say, antilock brakes and power windows. If you aren’t excited about your own product, you have problems that word of mouth marketing can’t solve.
Now that you’ve found and graded your communities, the next step is to figure out where they live.
Why do we talk to small communities? Because by talking to small communities, we can eventually talk to everyone who cares about a particular subject, even if they do not belong or they have never heard of these communities.
This is a principle at the heart of word of mouth marketing. You can’t personally share your story with everyone, and you don’t necessarily want to. You want to find the people who will care the most about your story, who know and are able to influence the most other people who will care about your story, and who have the deepest internal motivation for sharing it.
How does a story spread? Give moms a great story to tell about your sweeper: “We were waiting in line to see Santa, and there was this woman with a bag labeled ‘mess’ throwing action figures and pine needles all over a carpet. Zach ran up and asked if he could use the sweeper too, and next thing you know, he is sweeping up toys in the middle of the mall. By the way, you should check out this sweeper because it really did seem to suck up the pine needles.”
All you need is one of these moms standing around the playground to tell two friends this story. Then those friends will tell two friends, and so on. Armed with this story, the right mom can infect an entire school. And if you win the school, you win the neighborhood. Win the neighborhood, and you can win the state. And so on and so on.
Here’s a confession: We never thought about the parents’ cell phones in the Santa line during the BISSELL sweeper program. We missed that as a potential communications channel. Should we have anticipated it? Absolutely. But we were thinking about conversations, and to be sure, we started many. We simply didn’t consider the potential visual aspect of what we were presenting—well-dressed kids playing with a sweeper in the middle of a mall—until we saw the cell phones come out. We were focused on telling the right story to the right people at the right time, trusting that at least 1 out of every 10 of them would have that influencer personality.
Because we got those elements right, we didn’t need to worry about the cell phones. Frankly, we also weren’t worrying about whether these moms would tell their friends about the sweeper while they were at the playground or while they were picking up their kids from school or while they were at a cocktail party. It’s just about putting yourself in the right position. It’s about finding communities, figuring out where they gather—virtually or in person—and perfecting the story you put in front of them. At least 1 out of 10 of them will take care of the rest. It’s also about training your people correctly. If you’ve done that, you don’t have to worry about your ambassadors’ capacity to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. With the proper training, when your ambassadors see something in the field, they will be able to take advantage of it. The day after we saw the phones come out, we sent a notice to everyone to think about the phones. This was not a tough adjustment to make because we had trained everyone well.
You don’t have to worry about building the whole mousetrap. This is one reason we tell our stories to preexisting communities. They build the mousetrap for us. It’s all in their desire to share the story.
You know who won’t share your stories? People who think you are annoying. And when you are trying to start conversations with strangers in public places, you always run the risk of annoying them.
They say you should never come up with a negative rule in marketing. Well, here are two: Never interrupt someone. Never annoy someone.
Here are the two worst things you can do in marketing, as far as I’m concerned:
1. Call someone during dinner time.
2. Spray something on people in the mall.
No one goes to the mall to get sprayed, and absolutely no one sits down to dinner hoping a stranger with something to sell will dial his number at that moment. If your objective is to start a conversation with someone, and you start by getting in the way of something else he was trying to do, that’s bad. Who wants to start a conversation with an annoying person?
Again, give yourself the Brunch Test. If your best friend and your mother-in-law are in the middle of a conversation, and you interrupt them mid-dialogue to tell them a story about something utterly unrelated to what they were talking about, are they going to be interested? Or will you have turned them off from the get-go?
No, starting a solid conversation with someone frequently means letting them come to you. Like those kids and the sweepers—we didn’t push a BISSELL in anyone’s face. We weren’t annoying about it. We put our product in front of the right people at the right time, and conversations happened. Sometimes it’s hard to strike up a conversation without being intrusive. But you can always find a way.
People sometimes dismiss word of mouth marketing because they don’t understand it. They think the idea is to tell 10 random people about a product, who will each then tell 2 people, and so on and so on, until the world knows about it and decides to buy it. What those people don’t appreciate is that these communities exist—these deep, robust networks of influencers who are already talking to their friends and colleagues about their passions, which often include brands and products. All you’re doing is giving them something new to talk about. You’re feeding the beast, not giving birth to it. Talk to the right people in the right community about the right story, and it will spread as far as any commercial message—and with far more force.
But to know if that story is right, you have to test it. Yes, you can go out and spend $300,000 on A/B testing and focus groups. Or you can do the simple tests outlined in this chapter. Ask yourself, Who wants to hear this story? And under what conditions?
Is this a story that will inspire more conversations? Is it something people—even those who aren’t inclined to trust you—will want to talk about? If so, who are these people and where do you find them?
If every answer is yes, then go for it. You may have a talkable story. If not, change your story. Because these days, when loved ones and influencers hold far more sway over our purchasing decisions than any other factor, it is becoming harder and harder to sell a brand that people don’t care to talk about.