The Time Scale of Word of Mouth - What's the Shelf Life of Your Buzz?

This diagram and text are taken from the Buzz Canuck blog. The full post can be found here. It is interesting to see how powerful experiential marketing can be. When executed correctly it can help promote customer evangelism.

Experiential marketing - providing a transforming and immersive experience for a fan, customer or influencer, typically in the form of an event - lasting impressions of what the brand stands for and who it attracts may have ongoing attraction for participants (as only 10% believe they ever receive a positive customer experience anyway, this can come as a nice surprise), however, given experiential nature - feelings and memories do wane off over time unless repeated

Relevant occasions where used: where full scale experience can't be provided to all prospects (automobile sampling), creation of lifestyle brand/sentiment, affiliation with lifestyle property or values and where customers or fans like to congregate offline for entertainment, information, aesthetic enjoyment or escape


Customer Evangelism - the nirvana of brands seeking community strength - customer evangelism and zealotry, where oftentimes organization of this form of word of mouth is hosted by the fans themselves not the company (Ikea positive fanatics, Apple fans ) - this is truly the area where lifetime value of the customer plays a role as brand loyalty and affinity can span decades - obviously, from an orchestrated word of mouth approach - this takes year over year investment, company-wide embrace of customer/community centricity and dedicated resources to incubate sustainable enthusiasm

Relevant occasions where used: where the customer experience is so good, where a strong trust bond has been built up between brand and customer, premium and/or well-differentiated brands, brands with a strong point of view and experience that lives it, where employees are as big in the brand as most rabid customers

So as the women bar owner in the Blue Brothers movie responds to the question- "so what kind of music do you have here? Oh we have both kinds, country and western". I find word of mouth is considerably more discriminating and variety-driven.

Who told you about Susan Boyle?

One of this week’s most widely reported and talked about stories has been the appearance of Susan Boyle, a 47 year-old singer from Scotland, on the show Britain’s Got Talent. If you haven't seen Susan or heard of her meteoric rise to internet fame where have you been?! Susan has taken the World by storm and in only a few days has become one of the biggest viral hits of all time. According to Visible Measures and Mashable Susan Boyle related videos had achieved 93.2 million views by 10pm ET (USA) on Sunday.

How did everyone find out about it? Word of mouth used to be a face to face recommendation however with social networks such as facebook and twitter the reach has increased exponentially while the personal recommendation remains. Obviously this is one of the advantages of social media and I am not telling you anything new. In the case of Susan Boyle it is great to see a good news story getting the treatment. As the people at Domino's know only too well it is usually the bad experiences and the detractors which get the attention.

The tendency to spread bad news is human nature and is beautifully illustrated by Mario Vellandi in response to a challenge by David Armano on the Logic & Emotion blog.



Perhaps bad news travels well as it is inherently more interesting, shocking, confronting. Whatever the reason it is great to see the SBP (Susan Boyle Phenomenon) spread across a variety of networks solely on the basis of the underdog coming good. Best of luck Susan although I doubt you'll need it.