Future of Marketing: Word of Mouth
Lately we hear the term Word of Mouth (WOM) a lot but what is it and what does it mean, really?
Word of Mouth is not a new phrase. A psychologist from the 1970s named George Silverman is considered to be a pioneer on the topic. While he didn’t coin the phrase “Word of Mouth”, he called it “teleconferenced peer influence groups”. The word ‘peer’ is important here because it is connected with our evolutionary background.
Humans need to belong somewhere with people, evolutionarily speaking to a tribe. We act collectively and take the opinions of others seriously. In our modern world, this works in various ways but one of them is the mystical universe of The Word of Mouth.
WOM (Word of Mouth) can be explained in a very simple way:
You bought, used, and loved a product or service of a brand. It could be anything. Then while you are with your friends, you talk about this product that you love. You tell them how effective, useful, revolutionary it is. Your friends trust you, thus, they trust your experience with the brand. At this point, there is a positive judgment planted in their mind. Ergo, next time they go shopping, there is a high possibility that they will purchase the product. Voilà! You just practiced WOM in your circle.
The Idea Behind
It is simple yet very effective: marketing through real product users & lovers. Needless to say, WOM is not another marketing process where the company pays real product users to promote their goods. It is a true rating of the good.
Most importantly, it is personal and authentic. That is what makes WOM strong.
The future of marketing is not through paid, artificial, non-personal advertisements. It is through real people, real stories. That being said, the WOM does not just occur among our friends. There are a lot of ways to do it and actually, we practise WOM more often than we think.
As an example, we all look at the reviews section, which is the online version of classic Word of Mouth, of a product before purchasing it. The reason for that is simple –we search for validation by other users’ experiences with the brand. If reviews are not good for a certain product, no matter how good the advertisement of that product was, our desire to purchase it will dramatically decline.
The consumer behavior regarding the purchase of a good is highly connected with what we value as human beings –peer influence.
WOM Protocol project
Although WOM is not a new concept, as mentioned above, its development for marketing purposes is worth following closely.
A project called WOM Protocol offers various interesting development opportunities; not only to real product users but also to brands. Brands seek non-traditional marketing ideas to reach their target audiences and users seek honest product evaluations that they can trust. It is a win-win situation.
The project is also connected to a special app, called Yeay.
WOM Protocol for Content Creators via Yeay
The Yeay app enables you to create a personal account, like in every other social media platform. Once you set it up, you can start talking about your honest opinions and experiences with any product you use. The video recording length is 60 seconds. After you are done, you need to specify two main things: what is the brand and what is the product you just talked about. You can also use tags as well as select your video language for more interaction.
Now, you can either just post your video and leave it there or, you can additionally create your WOM-Wallet linked to your account. Once you create your wallet, whenever you post a video, you will be asked if you want to also ‘send’ the video. This means, your video will be examined for 3 important criteria: Authenticity, Creativity, and Positivity. If your video has unique content, you will be rewarded with WOM tokens. Currently the value of 1WOM=$0.085.
That being said, WOM protocol is not just for the creators but also marketers, publishers and Ecommerce.
Why Do We Need WOM Protocol
In today’s influencer marketing world, Word of Mouth itself can be highly misleading. Macro-influencers often promote products and brands that they do not like, believe or even use due to the need for fame and money. In the long run, this approach hurts companies since macro-influencers often do not match with the brand’s concept. Thus, it creates a fake, unreliable environment among followers which leads to a dramatic drop in sales.
WOM Protocol is here to change that pattern. The Protocol aims to bring authenticity back into the marketing field. Hence, it helps to boost the credibility of brands. Because the more real a promotion is, the more understood and safe the followers, as well as potential customers, will feel.
WOM Protocol is designed to create a trust and honesty based community through real product users and real experiences.
What is your experience with WOM? As a customer, how do you find brand promotion strategies on social media? Let us know your personal experiences in the comments.
