Commercial Alert Executive Director Gary Ruskin praises Sales Pitch Society II:
"It's an excellent piece. Bravo. Sad, too."
Read it for yourself.


6.14.06
The Branding Breed
-- OR --
Marketing Doublethink
The following is chapter II of Sales Pitch Society II, The Branding Breed. In the previous chapter, it was suggested that when it comes to word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing, "all those pie-charts and bar-graphs and stats that marketers employ to quantify return on their marketing investment are no longer just measuring how many people watched their ad or heard their ad or drove past their ad." Instead, "those pie-charts and bar-graphs and stats are measuring how many people became their ads."

(Download Sales Pitch Society II, an essay in PDF form, in its entirety here.)

The Branding Breed
Sales Pitch Society II, Chapter II
Of course, WOM proponents usually don't come out and say they want people to become their ads. When the "experts" are interviewed by the press, or promoting WOM in press releases and on book jackets, they allude to concepts like "consumer empowerment" and "brand ownership."

In October 2005 The New York Times published a story about people who create blogs dedicated to brands like Barq's root beer and the grocery store Trader Joe's. In it, WOM evangelist and co-author of the Church of the Customer blog Jackie Huba explained that these brand bloggers "feel like they own the brand, that it's theirs." WOMMA's Word of Mouth 101 white paper called its member companies "innovative agencies who understand how to empower and amplify the voice of the consumer."

In an October 2005 USA Today article, Steve Knox, CEO of Procter and Gamble's Tremor, a community of 250,000 teen WOM campaigners, explained, "To be a [Tremor] member is empowering for a teen….You have a voice that will be heard, and you get cool information before your friends receive it."

Jamie Tedford, SVP marketing and media innovation at ad agency Arnold Worldwide, also noted the empowerment factor while speaking on a panel about his client, Volkswagen, at the recent Word of Mouth Basic Training event in Disney-fied Orlando. He stressed, "We have the responsibility to remind [consumers], 'You have the power to help market this car.' "

Imagine that! He's given us the power to do his job for him!

In a natural habitat such as a marketing conference, creatures of WOM let their guards down, and their rhetoric becomes a lot more revealing. During her discussion about people who participated in a WOM marketing campaign for Kettle Chips, Senior Account Executive at Maxwell PR Jen Scott commented, "They actually want to do our marketing for us, and so we let them."

It can't get much more blatant than that. Or maybe it can. During a panel on Why People Talk, Kerry Stranman, partner and chief strategist at research firm MotiveQuest put it simply: "You can get them to do the work for you."

Also at the conference, Dave Balter, founder and president of BzzAgent, made an intriguing comment. He referred to the conversations that consumers have with one another as "a media channel," proclaiming, "This is a media channel. It's up to us to find out how to tap into it and harness it and organize it."

One of the most prominent WOM-centric agencies, BzzAgent claims to have run over 250 "WOM Programs" for clients including Anheuser-Busch, Cadbury Schwepps, Levi's, Ralph Lauren and Sun Microsystems. The agency organizes campaigns driven by its network of over 100,000 people, called BzzAgents, who sign up to help talk up its clients' brands. When they discuss those brands with other people, BzzAgents file reports describing the conversations, and the agency in turn provides those reports to its clients.

According to its own marketing literature, here's how BzzAgent works with corporate marketers and ad agencies to develop WOM campaigns:

"You provide the WOM catalyst (put your ingenious strategic and creative departments to work) and we provide access to our trained WOM volunteers. They'll spread the word and keep you informed, while creating another revenue stream for you in the process. "Ka-ching," indeed. Just like you organize and purchase other media for your clients, now you can easily harness the power of honest WOM."

Here's my question: if our words, thoughts, opinions, conversations, and relationships are a "media channel," are we comfortable with handing marketers the remote control? Because that's what a growing number of people are doing.

I can hear the WOM evangelists now. "No! It's the consumer who's controlling the remote, not us! It's no longer about top-down advertising! Consumers are dictating the marketing message now! We're ceding power to them!"

Could it be that WOM marketers have been spewing this Orwellian newspeak for so long, even they've fallen prey to it? This time, the doublethink slogans are not "War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength." They're more along the lines of:
Evangelism is Empowerment
Loyalty is Control
Influence is Altruism


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You can download Sales Pitch Society II, an essay in PDF form, in its entirety here. (No knowledge of the first Sales Pitch Society necessary!)

Want more? Download the first Sales Pitch Society PDF.



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