Yesterday I attended a breakfast event where Germany's first word of mouth marketing agency, trnd, presented this new marketing tool. Some may already be aware of this new approach, there already have been many campaigns in the US, in Germany, even in Poland already.
The idea is to involve a selected group of opinion leaders in your marketing campaign directly. They receive products to check them out - and to talk about them to their friends. These may even also receive some product samples - because the idea is they again talk to their friends and these to their friends - an so on. There are blogs being created as part of the campaigns (like this one about an Opel campaign) and generally the WOM'ers are creating lots of stuff around the products they review and talk about (like videos, pictures etc who then will be sent to the usual platforms like Flickr, Youtube, Sevenload etc).
WOM (Word of Mouth) marketing is taking PR directly to the opinion leaders and let them do the marketing for you (you don't even have to pay them directly - although I have been told in the end WOM campaigns are far from inexpensive).
Interestingly with many products traditional WOM really had a strong impact on buying decisions - because people trust their friends more than ads or even journalists (!). My fear is that once people realize that WOM is now being part of a professional marketing campaign and the WOM'ers are directly supported by the vendors, the value of WOM is decreasing fast. Like no-one today trusts ads anymore and people even start disbelieving TV. Still, it will be interesting to see how WOM is going to develop and how we will come across some of the campaigns in the future.
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