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Jim Calhoun is the CEO/Founder of Popular Media and a Silicon Valley veteran. Before founding PopularMedia, Jim was a co-founder of CustomerClick LLC, a multi-million dollar direct marketing firm whose clients include Yahoo!, UnitedHealthGroup, and ABC Television. Previously, Jim served as Vice President of Products at NetObjects, Inc. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

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Enter the Viral Marketing Matrix: Exploring the Template to Motivate Your Word-of-Mouth Revolution

Written on
Dec 22, 2006 
Author
Jim Calhoun  |
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Enter the Viral Marketing Matrix: Exploring the Template to Motivate Your Word-of-Mouth Revolution

High Personal Appeal, Low Social Appeal

So many marketers start out with a good product and a loyal customer base — but can’t seem to succeed with word-of-mouth marketing. Why? They fail to recognize a negative association with their product. After all, they figure, customers love what they’re selling.

Unfortunately, individual customer loyalty may not translate to word-of-mouth success. I may love a particular diet program, but I won’t recommend it to my overweight friends, for fear of social repercussions.

So what can you do as a marketer?

Focus your messaging on me, not my friends. In group situations, we’re pressured to conform to the social norm. If our own preferences don’t match what we perceive as the norm, we’ll tend to assume we’re the only one who feels that way, and stay silent. Focusing on my friends will just increase this effect.

Instead of making me think of myself as part of a group, focus on me as an individual. Don’t mention the negative social stereotypes: just get me thinking about all the things I personally love about the product. The more I focus on myself, the more confident I’ll be that others will feel the same way I do.

Use an incentive as an excuse to engage with the brand. Here’s a place where an incentive can give people a socially acceptable excuse to start the conversation. Instead of telling people “I couldn’t get a date until I used this service,” I can tell them about an interesting promotion the dating service is running — almost as a proxy for the real conversation. You’ll get the most mileage from something with high social and personal appeal, which appeals to your target consumers without carrying the same social stigma.

Low Personal Appeal, High Social Appeal

We’ve all done it — embraced a fad we thought was silly or taken up a position that we didn’t really feel strongly about, just to go along with the group. Used positively, social motivation can be critical to the sustainability of a viral program.

You can leverage your product’s high social appeal to keep your message active, even when it reaches people who don’t necessarily find it compelling — but who could be inspired to pass it on to others. As a bonus, once people share your message, they’ll actually tend to find your product more appealing than before.

Focus on the social benefits. Here’s where you really do want to emphasize the group norm. Show me that embracing your message will gain the approval and gratitude of my peers. Invoke positive stereotypes and use language about “joining,” “getting involved,” and “inviting friends.”

Provide an incentive, but use brand love as an excuse. Personally, I might be more motivated by an incentive than by your primary product — but I know I’ll look better to my friends if I appear to be motivated by cause awareness or brand love. Make sure your messaging will make me look good to my friends, and I’ll be happy to pass it along.

High Personal Appeal, High Social Appeal

This is the ideal position: consumers want your product and derive a social benefit from showing it off.

The rule here: go with what works. Emphasize the product and positive stereotypes about its users. Will it make me seem cool? Compassionate? Intelligent? Is the product or service really useful? Since this is about word of mouth, go ahead and put extra focus on the social benefits of spreading the word.

Avoid incentives. In this position, off-brand incentives can be dangerous. They replace an “intrinsic motivation” (love for your brand) with an “extrinsic motivation” (desire for a reward). When the reward goes away, you’ve lost the brand love. (Incidentally, this is why you should never bribe your kids to do something they already enjoy — they’ll actually end up enjoying it less as a result of the rewards.) If you feel you must use or at least test an incentive, keep it on-brand and complementary to your primary product.

Low Personal Appeal, Low Social Appeal

This is the toughest position, and you may want to re-think your product: do you really want to sell something that people don’t want and are embarrassed to be seen with? If you really do believe that it’s a product worth promoting, here are a few ways you can make a viral campaign work.

Re-frame your product to increase appeal. Is it really a bad product, or are you just marketing it the wrong way? Do some market testing to find out which product attributes are the most appealing — they may not be the ones you think. A word-of-mouth campaign with reliable measurement and reporting can be the fastest and most cost-effective way to find out what really resonates.

At the same time, find out where the social stigma is coming from, and whether you can re-position to avoid it. Consider the difference between “weight-loss program” and “health club,” or between “dating service” and “social networking site.”





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