Word-of-Mouth Marketing is Alive During the Pandemic

Guess what? A lot of the face-to-face storytelling about brands during this pandemic has moved onto Zoom. Virtual happy hours. Virtual meet-ups. Virtual hang-outs. Facebook Livestream groups. But we’re still talking about brands we love. And premium CPG brands tend to get an unusual amount of free word-of-mouth. It’s not quite the same, but with modern 1080p streaming and 1gigabyte download speeds, it’s remarkable how much facial recognition and facial scanning we can still perform online in 2020.

Earlier today, Ted Wright and I spoke about word-of-mouth marketing and took questions from live viewers. If you don’t know him, Ted is the leader of an elite, global WOMM agency, Fizz, and author of a major bestseller with the same name, which you can find on Amazon.

Ted has done quantitative research on how 10% of a brand’s consumers, on average, are essentially viral, storytelling superspreaders, the kind of people we listen to when they recommend a brand, or talk it up.

Seeding the right kind of story about your brand is a delicate art at the core of word-mouthing marketing. It happens all the time when consumers find brands they are passionate about. As a founder, you can listen to stories consumers tell about your brand and make the most strategically scalable ones the core of your marketing strategy more broadly.

Word-of-mouth is both a source of data AND a tactic undercapitalized founders need to utilize in the early years when time is more abundant than cash. Get out there and tell your story. As Ted says: Make it Authentic. Make it Interesting, Make it Relevant.

Don’t make your story about you or why you founded your company. That violates the Relevancy clause of Word-of-Mouth Marketing.

Listen to the entire Live Show HERE.

Dr. James Richardson

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