The recent IJMR conference, ‘Stop Talking, Start Listening’ was treated to a fascinating review of a new style of consumer data. Ed Keller introduced the conference to ‘Word of Mouth’. Jon Chandler explains how this research technique can open up insight into the world of the consumer.
Jon Chandler 
18 Dec, 2009
Word of Mouth: Capturing What Consumers Say
Word of Mouth is not a new concept, but the service and data that Word of
Mouth provides is a new, original and extremely innovative market research
offering. What the Word of Mouth offering does is attempt to capture what consumers
say to each other about brands and products on an everyday basis. It does this
by capturing the totality of a person’s brand conversations on a single day
and doing this for thousands and thousands of consumers. The essence of each
individual exchange is logged by subject area, brand and content. Building
a database of hundreds of thousands of consumer conversations over time opens
a window into the live processes through which people make brands in the real
world.
All of this reminds us of some simple and profound truths that sometimes elude
us:
- As human beings we are fundamentally social animals and that part of being social means the exchange of information, experience and views with those in the world around us.
- That part of this exchange involves sending and receiving messages about brands, products, services and so on. The consumer world is filled with a cacophonous babble about these things. We often trust this babble for more than other media because it is more authentically human and often comes from those we know and trust.
That Word of Mouth represents one of the key vehicles through which brands
are built. The image of BMW as offering quality engineering is the sum product
of millions or even billions of consumer utterances and expressions. Advertising
and marketing play a role in providing focus, suggestion or direction but
without the reinforcement and interpretation in Word of Mouth these can go
nowhere.
Viewed against this backdrop ‘new concepts’ like viral marketing are not so much ‘new’ as an astute recognition that Word of Mouth is a vital part of human social processes. Word of Mouth is how most of us learn much of what we ‘know’ overall and much of what we ‘know’ specifically about different brands.
Ed Keller’s Word of Mouth interviews work like dream catchers, snagging 20,
30, 40, 50 individual brand messages that an individual consumer sends or receives
in a day. They take miniature samples of all that babble that is in the consumer
ether. What Word of Mouth does is to reinstate that idea of ‘hearsay’ as something
vitally important in the fabric of the social world. Hearsay… what we hear
from those around us and what we say to them… is not somehow frivolous, superficial
or untrustworthy. Much of the time ‘hearsay’ is some of the key stuff by which
we live our lives.
From the world of healthcare brands all of this is intriguing. It is intriguing not because we wonder whether medical professionals are doing this, it is intriguing because we know they must be, we just don’t know what they are saying.
All over the world, Doctors are talking to and listening to each other. They
are talking to nurses and patients, they are interacting with payors. The babble
in their world is likewise filled with experiences, reactions, opinions and
views. All of this is a vital part of the mix through which they come to see
new therapy X as “interesting because… but no good if”. Hearsay is a vital
channel through which they learn.
Classical market research methods only tap into this ‘hearsay’ in a very tangential
way. Some of what is fed back in interviews ad groups is in some ways another
part of that ‘hearsay’, but it is already potentially distorted by the research
agenda that brought it into being. What would be far more interesting would
be to plant our own dream catchers in the world of the doctor. Only if we do
this can we find out if anyone is talking about the latest therapy launch…
and if they are; what they are really saying about it.
To find out more information on ‘Word of Mouth’ visit kellerfay.com
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