Word of mouth remains one of the top ways that people hear about a business, and that’s unlikely to change. However, word of mouth is only valuable if people understand what they’re sharing.
In the book “Contagious“, they share this idea:
When trying to generate word of mouth, many people forget one important detail. They focus so much on getting people to talk that they ignore the part that really matters: what people are talking about.
They take it further, sharing a story from the 2004 Olympics where there was a marketing stunt that got a lot of attention, but not for the company that was being promoted:
Marketing experts talk about “the fool in the pool” as one of the worst guerrilla marketing failures of all time. Usually they deride it for having disrupted the competition and ruining the moment for athletes who had trained all their lives. They also point out that it led to Ron Bensimhon being arrested and fined. These are all good reasons to consider Bensimhon’s belly flop, well, a flop. But I’d like to add another one to the list. The stunt had nothing to do with the product it was trying to promote.
This happens a lot with content online. A company will come up with a super creative video, and it might go viral, but people don’t understand how the video related to the product. A great example was Evian’s “Roller Babies” commercial; it was super popular, but had no effect on the company’s revenue. In fact, despite being among the top ads of all time, their sales dropped 25 percent that year.
Creative ideas can be awesome, but creative ideas that actually tie into what you do are worth far more.
