Word of Mouth.
Marketers think they can spontaneously create it.
But to expand on a truism from Andy Sernovitz's new book, Word of Mouth Marketing (via Sam Decker's excellent blog) ...
In reality, customers create WOM.
To quote Decker quoting Sernovitz ...
Word of Mouth is “CtoC” Marketing Actually, it’s BtoCtoC. Your job as a marketer is to put out an idea worth talking about. That’s marketing. When a real person repeats it, that’s word of mouth. [emphasis mine] It’s about the second hop (and the third hop, and the fourth hop, and so on).
So, our real job as marketers is to ensure that we've made something worth talking about. And so begins the dance between product management and product marketing (steps I'm learning to do). Marketers need to understand our products more than ever, but more importantly, we need to understand our customer and what they need.
Not in a crazy, target-market, psychographed, demographed, segmented, chopped, and deep-fat-fried kind of way.
More in a long-tail kind of way.
The long tail is the source of new markets. And it is the source of new imagining about marketing. Really, if you expand that, in a dreamy Friday-afternoon kind of way ... the long tail is the source of new marketers, our customers. Citizen marketers.
Traditional marketers will necessarily evolve or die. And their evolution is to be listeners and mediators between product developers and our customers. And to be their voice in the wee hours of the morning when a developer wants to know what feature to implement next.
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