Example of WOM Creative

We were reminded of an example of Influencers creating WOM creative. As Kerry Stranman at Motivequest (www.motivequest.com) recently commented on the WOMMA (www.womma.org) website - "As New Balance was repositioning itself against Nike, it looked to its heritage in amateur athletics in its "For Love or Money" campaign. They created a space online & asked consumers to post pictures of themselves and tell their "everyday athlete" story. The stories that were generated ("I run because I almost lost my mother-in-law to cancer and it was the one thing I could control...") allow the consumers to feel a sense of participation in the brand, and gave the brand a level of authenticity that straight-forward advertising can't do alone."

If we all thought a bit, I'm sure we would come up with other examples. Now,if you want to get technical about it, it would be great to find out if those Influencers that visited the site actually helped New Balance reach their objectives - wonder if it was sales or pulling together the community?

Mobilizing Your Message

Ok – so before I start writing about how to produce creative for word-of-mouth, can anyone remember when the last time was that so many people around the US got together and actually protested something with such vigor? I’m talking about the immigration debate that is going on right now and the hundreds of thousands of protesters gathering and marching in cities around the country. Talk about a word-of-mouth campaign. A single issue...a myriad of messages and stories…all mobilized by Influencers in the community.

Ok-back to the creative. One of the great debates that exist with word-of-mouth has to do with control. Traditional marketers are all about top down marketing; strategies drive tactics. A question we at the shop here have always had is “How can you come up with long term strategic plans when you cannot predict the future –especially your competition?” We believe in tactical-based strategies when it comes to word-of-mouth. In other words, strategy needs to be developed from a deep knowledge in the actual tactics of the business itself. With an obvious nod to Al Ries and Jack Trout’s book, Bottom-Up Marketing, the only way you can nurture the type of story that people want to talk to others about is by creating half the story…from the marketers’ perspective. This is the creative. By giving people whom we call Influencers half the story, they have a trigger to complete it and make it their own. It’s kind of like that movie with Sean Connery where he’s a writer and he has the kid from the hood take some of his stuff so he can write some of his own stories. When you're ready to execute the Influencer Program, the result of this collaboration between marketer, agency and Influencer is an authentic story that you helped nurture and bring to the surface. Oh, by the way – you can control certain elements of the creative even if the Influencer has a 50% ownership. You can have an underlying creative platform that’s steeped in the brand essence and that won’t change. You can make certain everything follows that. AND you have to constantly reinvent the triggers…because…sing with me…..now that you have that relationship with the customer/consumer that you’ve always wanted, keeping things fresh should be at the top of your list of priorities.

I think it was Hispanic DJs in LA that rallied everyone…normally competing against one another, they rallied everyone to the cause – very cool.

How Do You Create WOM Creative?

I don't remember any other discipline going through so much analysis that everyone forgot about the heart of the matter - the story!

WOM is all about sharing interesting stories, yet everyone who talks about WOM talks about how it can be tracked or how you find the people that need to be "talked" to, (like a channel)- but what about the stories themselves? Very rarely are we talking or debating what constitutes a great story - what we at the agency here still call the "creative". Yes - it is possible to have authentic stories communicated from one person to the other and still call those stories "creative".

Imagine a WOM agency in the very beginning of a program or effort - where those creative types are manufacturing storyboards or concepts. What if that creative material came from actual customers of yours instead of your agency's creatives? I'm not talking about a contest, (now seemingly a tactic that everyone has done), where people send in a commercial. I'm talking about actually going to talk to consumers and customers to learn about what their experiences are with your brand, your sales force, your delivery folks and ultimately the people in your organization. Are people saying good things about the brand or company? Do they have great stories? What about their needs?

What I'm talking about is having a relationship with your customers and consumers. If you have any type of relationship with them, we, (meaning you, the client and us, the agency), have the ability to creatively nurture the right message - the creative. In our world, that means creating so others can create.

More tomorrow.