Source: Edelman Insights
Thanks to a blog post from Jackie Huba of Church of the Customer, I came to learn about Edelman Insights Presentation titled “Key Employee Engagement Findings from Edelman’s 2012 Trust Barometer”. From the survey results (graphic above), several facts seemed to pop out:
1) People are increasingly losing their trust in the heads of organisations like CEOs. This has dropped by a whopping 12% in 2012 compared to 2011.
According to the latest post on Church of the Customer, the most important platform for consumers to talk about brands isn’t on Facebook, Google +, Twitter or even SMS! Rather, it is good old person-to-person communication in the flesh (well at least in the US).
Have a look at this chart here from eMarketer:
Source: eMarketer.com
Sometimes, the best folks to market your brand are not advertising agencies, publicists or sales persons.
Just ask Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, stalwarts of the highly popular Church of the Customer blog and founders of Ant’s Eye View.
Courtesy of gapingvoid.com
As I trawl through my RSS feeds this week, the following posts caught my eye.
The first is this fascinating titbit in Branding Strategy Insider which noted how Chinese adopting Western names are using more unique monikers to make themselves stand out from the usual Toms, Dicks and Sallys. They include a young lady who calls herself Vanilla Wang, an artist working on wood-block prints who is renamed Colour Zhao, and a Beijing video editor called Thunder Wang. The rationale behind this is to give greater significance to their names and to also make themselves more easily remembered from the seas of Johns and Janes – a legacy of the traditional Chinese emphasis of according meanings to names.
Image courtesy of Billboard
“Sorry” might have been one of the hottest hits by Justin Beiber ever (with over 3.15 billion YouTube views to date). However, it is still incredibly hard for companies to say.
And that has led to so many countless cases of organisational grief over the years.
There is something which I always suspected about offline versus online Word Of Mouth (WOM) marketing. And that is that nothing beats the real thing.
While reading my favourite blog about WOM, which is the Church of the Customer, I came across these interesting statistics through its links. They hail from the US, the world’s most wired nation:
“Around 3.5 billion word of mouth conversations take place in the U.S. on a daily basis, of which just 7% take place online via instant/test messaging, chat rooms, email and blogs. The remainder take place offline either face to face (75%) or on the telephone (17%).”
Wow and double wow. A tip off from my regular read Church of the Customer led me to this story by Virginia of Brains On Fire about how P&G is revolutionising toilet papers. Yeah, you didn’t read me wrong.
Apparently, what happened was that the FMCG behemoth fitted out an entire toilet and a lot more as part of the their efforts in promoting Charmin toilet paper. There are even two strengths available – Extra Strong and Extra Soft – depending on your inclination and err….vigour. What’s neat is that ancilliary brands like tissues, scented wipes, and serviettes were also promoted along with the necessary waste disposal expendable item. Check out the Youtube video on this here:
Now, if only we can create an entire bathroom completely decked out with the toiletry products of leading brands inside for a completely brand immersive experience? Of course, the experience must be great in order to generate positive rather than negative Word Of Mouth.
Anybody game for this here in Singapore?
Here’s yet another gem from Church of the Customer’s Jackie Huba on writing “Thank You” notes that rock! If you want to build a word-of-mouth focused and buzzworthy business, here is the way to go. I would probably add another point which is to handwrite the note – if you can help it!
Link here.
Courtesy of ChurchoftheCustomer.com
Got tipped off about this from Ian McKee at a recent lunch talk, and also found it on one of my favourite marketing blogs Church of the Customer. Apparently, a new study by Nielsen has revealed that Word Of Mouth (WOM) is yet again the number one motivating factor behind customer purchases. This isn’t surprising considering that most of us would much rather trust a friend or family member than an oh-so-slick and smooth advertisement.
What’s especially interesting is this chart below:
Came across this fabulous titbit from one of my favourite blogs Church of the Customer. I don’t think there is a better way to market one’s products or services, do you? If only, we can do that on supermarket aisles and also include customer testimonials into the whole proposition.