How and Why
to Research Word of Mouth
By George Silverman
President; Market Navigation, Inc.
Word of mouth is the most neglected of all the forces at
work in the marketplace. Yet is the most powerful. Word of mouth has probably
destroyed more products and, conversely, made more products successful then all
the other forces in the marketplace put together. Why isn’t it researched
more?
Probably because people think they are already researching
it. After all, aren’t they researching people’s attitudes, opinions,
expectations, wishes, hopes and fears — the very things that drive word of
mouth? Also, they probably think that nothing can be done about word of mouth
anyway.
However, it is not enough to research the underlying
determinants of word of mouth. You need to know the issues and concerns that
your prospects actually communicate:
what your prospects and rejecters are actually asking and how your customers respond.
Why? Because after hearing your sales pitch, or seeing your
advertising, your prospects start talking
about your product. The customers’ private
opinions about the product influences their own
behavior. But they don’t always express what they think and feel. What they say about the product to each other
(word of mouth) influences the behavior of their friends and colleagues,
multiplying throughout the land, influencing the direction and speed of the
marketplace.
Most companies expend huge amounts of resources researching
advertising, sales aids, and other promotional materials. Companies allocate
little or no time to researching word of mouth issues such as:
·
What are the non-users asking the users?
·
What are the users actually telling the non-users?
·
How are the objections, concerns, and qualms of your
prospects answered?
·
How do your customers actually persuade their friends
to use your product?
·
How do your customers suggest they initially get to
know (try) your product?
Word of mouth is a live,
interactive medium, and depends as much on the questions of the recipients of word of mouth as it does
on the senders. In other words, just because an attitude is there, does not
mean that it will be expressed, or paid attention to.
Not only do you want to hear the contents of the word of
mouth, you want to hear the sequence
and the source. Often, sequence is as important as content.
Word of mouth research will help you put your information in the right
psychological order. When things get a little out of sequence in word of mouth,
people say, “Wait a minute, you’re losing me. Let’s back up a little.” In other
marketing materials such as brochures, when you’ve lost them, you’ve lost them.
Also, the source
of the word of mouth is extremely important. In some situations, people won’t
try until they have heard the opinions of experts. In other situations, people
feel that the experts are completely out of touch and will not understand their
“ordinary” situation.
How to research word of mouth
The only way to research word of mouth is to research it
directly. You can’t just ask people, “How would you describe the product to a
friend?” That’s a good first step, but you need to hear how her friend answers,
what questions arise, how they are answered, etc.
Focus groups are perfect for word of mouth research. It is
as if this methodology were invented to research word of mouth, even though it
wasn’t. It is the best way to directly observe and hear the actual word of mouth in process. In
other words, it is not a way of asking people to recall their word of mouth interactions — in surveys, for instance.
It is a way of hearing them directly.
The focus group, using designs that I will describe later, is a way of causing actual word of mouth to happen, not just
simulations of word of mouth. You can
actually get customers talking with prospects in the process of convincing
them. Dyads and triads can also be used.
However, a different kind of focus group is needed. The
following is a basic research design, which needs to be modified according to
the specific circumstances and objectives of the research, but it will serve as
a template from which to make modifications.
This basic research design has been called the 2-2-2 design
by one of my clients. Conduct two focus groups of customers, two focus groups
of prospects, and two of mixed groups of enthusiastic customers mixed with
skeptical prospects. Alternate the first four groups, starting with customers
or prospects, depending on the circumstances. Do the usual probing about
attitudes and opinions of the product, then get into questions like,
·
What would you tell a friend?
·
How would you persuade a skeptic?
·
What questions would you anticipate from a skeptic?
·
How would you answer their objections?
Then, conduct a focus group of skeptical prospects. Explain
the benefits of the product as described by the first group. Then probe for the
next level of qualms and objections. Listen carefully for the first signs of
persuasion, which are often someone saying “Hmmm, that sounds interesting, I’ll
have to think about that.” Notice that this person is not persuaded, but his
mind has been opened up.
Keep probing for objections that have been answered by the
first group, but not accepted by the second group, or new objections that
haven’t been answered. I try out some of the answers that have been provided by
the company, and some of my own which are constructed on the spot, drawing upon
my experience with similar situations.
Cycle through at least two more groups to get into deeper
levels of objections and deeper persuasion.
Now you are ready to run actual word-of-mouth groups. These
are the mixed groups of enthusiastic customers or product advocates, and
skeptical prospects. Up until now, you have only gotten one side in each group,
but haven’t yet gotten people talking with each other in actual word of mouth
conversations. Sometimes you can give the customers the assignment to “sell”
the product to the prospects and the prospects to either resist or “unsell” the
customers. This takes a very special sort of moderating that is a mixture of
subtle guidance and Devil’s Advocacy. Sometimes you need to prod and provoke,
other times you have to sit back and say almost nothing. It mostly comes from
an intuitive understanding of how word of mouth works, coupled with what you
have learned in the first four groups.
What you want to do, ideally, is get the product advocates
to persuade the skeptical prospects. Once you have that, you know the ideal word of mouth that you want to encourage. These
strategies and tactics should serve as the basis of all your advertising and
sales messages. They are, after all, what is actually persuading people. So,
advertising and selling should be designed around word of mouth, rather than
regard word of mouth as an accidental byproduct of promotional efforts. This is
a revolutionary thought and a paradigm shift.
By modifying this research design, you can put together
experts with more typical customers, local influencers with their sphere of
influence, retailers with their customers, and other kinds of people that you
ordinarily wouldn’t put together into a focus group because they tend to
persuade each other and bias each others’ opinions. Here, that’s exactly what
you want to observe! Virtually any kind of people who are engaged in word of
mouth can be researched in this way: Medical specialists + general
practitioners, physicians + nurses, auto mavens + car buyers, editors + their
readers, travel agents + travelers, financial advisors + investors, etc.
Everyone except gladiators and lions, or cats and dogs.
For instance, you can survey your new car buyers, asking why
they bought their car, their level of satisfaction, etc. Or, you can run word
of mouth research sessions to hear what they actually tell their friends. These are two completely different
things, and you gain an enormous competitive advantage if you know both.
One of the best ways to conduct these focus groups is to use
telephone
focus groups. Telephone focus groups allow you to put people together from
different cities at the same time. This in turn, allows people the
psychological safety to be much more frank and open in their interactions. In
face-to-face sessions, there is too much chance of people either knowing each
other in a given city or worrying that they will meet each other in a professional
capacity.
It is important to realize that word of mouth can — and
should — be researched well before a product launch. Even before a product is
launched, there are often expectations about it. Many people, particularly
innovators and early adopters, have heard about the product and are discussing
it. It is crucial that you know what’s going on here. Even if they have not
heard of your product, it is worth telling some people about it and hearing not
only their reactions, as is so commonly done in focus groups, but to hear how
they would explain the product to colleagues. Often, they can come up with
simple, elegant descriptions, metaphors., and analogies that people who are too
close to the product cannot do in less than several pages.
In this type of situation, instead of putting together users
and non-users, you want to put together people who are extremely favorable to
the product idea with skeptics.
You can modify the above research designs to fit most
situations.
I hope I’ve opened up your eyes to the importance of
researching word of mouth and given you some ideas about how to implement word
of mouth research.
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