The Marketing of 2011 – Word of Mouth

2011 brings many things with it, one being a big change at RaveTopia. As an idea and a business we are still young (although I am feeling a lot older :).

I started RaveTopia around the middle of last year as an extension to my marketing consultancy.  Yet it has taken over the focus of my old business and is really only being born now in January.

What Are We

While we have a few small clients I spent a large part of last year looking at the South African market and defining our place in it.  After seeing the hard impact that the banking crisis had on brand and marketing – and the caution that followed – I really wanted to create something that was solid and meaningful to my clients.

RaveTopia is the outcome of that process.

So … What is RaveTopia and where are we going …

A fully Fledged Word of Mouth Marketing Agency

Consumer psychology has changed in the last 10 years thanks to the internet. How we make buying decisions has evolved from the passive compliance of advertising to the more discerning thought process of peer review.

Today we evaluate our decisions based on what others like us say rather than what a brand has to say. This has made word of marketing really important.

Ironically many marketers to confuse word of mouth marketing with technology. Technology is the enabler, not the definer.  Word of Mouth Marketing is, and will always be about people and communities. Marketing is still about consumer psychology.

What does this mean in today’s connected world:

• Up to 90 % of all word of mouth happens naturally and organically in everyday, offline conversations
• These natural, organic conversations are the real influencer of how buying decisions are made

For me the focus has be about the consumer psychology: About buying decisions, how we make those decisions and how we can influence. There is no doubt that  technology has a huge role to play and the goal is about getting the best return on your marketing and growing customer loyalty. And customer loyalty has four behavioural characteristics where your customer:

• Stays for longer,
• Buys more, for more,
• Readily accepts new products and services
• Gives you real, honest feedback about your business that you can use

Positive customer experiences creates positive word of mouth

If you are not going to change the experience to improve it – then don’t bother. And by improving the experience, your referral number should grow. This does involve some aspects of change management and makes it a really interesting process.

Of course a key outcome of an improved customer experience is positive word of mouth.

Word of Mouth Movements – or Tribes

This, to me, is what it is all about. It’s what it all comes down to.

Many brands try and start a movement. They create the idea, the platforms and try and make it happen. The problem is that this just becomes another broadcast approach to marketing and is not really about the community or about a movement.

A movement starts when a movement owns the movement. When everyone – read that as customers – passion is ignited, excited, owned and expressed. Only then it can be sustainable.

This happens in an offline and online world:

• In the offline world we focus on communities and natural organic word of mouth and an online world.
• In the online world we focus on creating a platform that enables the word of mouth communication and builds leadership, authority and trust (The LAT Brand Principle) for the your brand.

This is the ultimate goal of RaveTopia

The Blog

The blog is such an important part of my live and has given me as much pleasure as pain. I find writing as hard as it is rewarding and this is will be the focus:

• It will focus on Word of Mouth marketing and explore the idea in as much detail as possible. It will look at social media, consumer psychology, customer experience, brand and marketing and a few other areas.
• I am working with some very interesting fellows on putting some good weekly podcast material together. More about this later in the month.
• I am going to looking for contributors. I don’t want to punish you for too long with my poor grammar and average writing skills so there will be guest posts by numerous authors in related fields.
• I need to find a proof reader — as you may have noticed.

That’s it. I am excited about this year and what we are building here at RaveTopia. Taking the extended break over Christmas certainly helps bring a lot of clarity to our process and systems and I look forward to an engaging year.

Please if you have any ideas, suggestions comments etc, please drop them into the comments section below.

And yes – we are hiring. I am looking for an account manager and a young WordPress expert.

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