Keith Jackson
There was a story in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald that its progenitors would have been pleased with. A marketing firm, Naked Communications, recruited 1,300 young women to ‘seed’ a new US soap opera amongst their friends. Each ‘ambassador’ was to recruit ten people to the show. So, when it debuted last Tuesday, as many as 13,000 of Gossip Girl’s paltry 154,000 national viewers may have been despatched there by Naked Communications’ busy elves.
This technique is called ‘word of mouth’ marketing and it is quite the rage in the US. It is based on the premise that if you allow people into the exclusive club of being first to know about something and provide them with a few trinkets (like sample products and publicity material) along the way, plus a bit of instruction on how to expose their friends to the initiative, the buzz will be seeded and word of mouth will do the rest.
Now this is fine as far as it goes. But when I was at an international public relations conference in Athens earlier this year, and the Americans were discoursing enthusiastically about this new addition to PR’s armoury, a number of European delegates and I had reservations about the implications.
Say a firm wants to launch a new perfume. It recruits 2,000 ‘ambassadors’, gives them two hours training, product samples, promotional material and perhaps a little cash for their trouble and asks them to go out and multiply by convening sessions for 20 friends and acquaintances. Before week’s end 4,000 people have been exposed to the new product and are racing around busily talking it up with their friends
The problem is one of transparency. Do the ‘ambassadors’ let on that they’ve been recruited to the task? That they are not just expressing their own independently formed view, but that they have been called to the flag and are being rewarded to spruik? Quite simply, if our ‘ambassadors’ do not disclose the true nature of their relationship to the product, they are behaving unethically. And so is the PR or marketing firm that hires them.
Most of us would be appalled if our friends recommended a product to us which, unbeknownst to us, they had been rewarded to promote. I think we would feel our friendship had been abused. And herein lies the difficulty with ‘word of mouth’. Like many other PR methods, if it is used transparently it is OK. If not, it is far from OK.
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