Word of Mouth Marketing II

I am still reading the book that I recommended in my last blog post. I feel this book is really good, because firstly the author is very familiar with how word-of-mouth marketing works. Inside the book, he also tells us how to conduct research on how to find out how it works, and how you can tap this knowledge to your advantage.

To see how word-of-marketing works in your industry, the author recommend you create focus group and in this focus group, there should be a group of enthusiastic users for your products or services and a slightly larger group of non-users. Take not that enthusiastic users should be smaller in number than non-users. Strange it may seem, but after the many experience he had, this is what he has found out. The author also work in retailing through his father’s shop for a long time and has seen how his father created word-of-mouth marketing to work for him and his stores.

So I strongly recommended this book to whoever wants to explore and use this powerful marketing tool.

Another thing I want to share with the readers is a short article I read in Harvard Business Review June 2006 Issue. The article is talking about offering choices to customers. It is found out that there is a number of choices that becomes a tipping point where it will reduce customer's satisfaction. Yes, it does not mean that the greater the number of choices, the higher the customer satisfaction or can capture a larger share of the market. I personally think this is true because, once the number of choice becomes large, I would need help to find one option that can satisfy me. This complicates my purchase decision and at the end of the day, I might just give up either by not purchasing or just choose an option that I initially think is the best but at the end does not fit me at all. And since it does not fit me at all, my satisfaction is lower, and the company would lose a customer.

Food for thoughts? Sure. Cheers!