JACK TROUT INTERVIEWS EDELMAN'S STEVE RUBEL AND RICK MURRAY ABOUT WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING

Errol Smith producer of Trout Radio was kind of enough to give us a heads-up on a series of conversations Jack Trout had with folks like Seth Godin, Steve Rubel, Rick Murray, Joseph Jaffe and Emanuel Rosen deconstructing the buzz around word-of-mouth. Errol reports that the "rumors of Jack's passing are indeed greatly exaggerated".

I listened to the podcast of Jack's conversation with Edelman's Rick Murray and Steve Rubel. I gotta hand it to Jack - he was polite and restrained. Both Rubel and Murray came off as glib and lacking credibility. You need to listen to the recording and establish your own conclusion.

The one thing that keeps replaying in my mind was Rick Murray's examples of word of mouth marketing that supposedly worked. The two examples he threw out were Burger Kings Subservient Chicken video and Oprah's G6 give-away which he fully acknowledged generated enormous buzz but no sales. Jack was both polite and restrained by not pursuing this further than he did.

There was also an interesting exchange about whether word of mouth marketing works for pedestrian products. Steve Rubel's response was to list a four-step process which I swear to God came straight out of a Philip Kotler textbook from the 1970's. Once again, Jack was polite and restrained in not challenging Steve further about the "newness" of this approach, and whether it can really work with pedestrian products.

We've blogged about the pedestrian product issue. Bottom line being what happens when you don't have extraordinary people, innovative products, extraordinary customer experiences and rock solid infrastructure (as described by Tom Peters)? As marketers what do you do when you're dealing with regular folks, mediocre products, miniscule budgets, immediate demands, OK customer experiences, and infrastructure held together with spit and baling wire (in other words 99% of American enterprises)?

Will "new" marketing approaches like WOMM even work in these pedestrian situations? I agree with Jack's conclusion that WOMM is at best one more tool in a portfolio of tools. But is it really new? Is it really effective? Will it generate sustainable competitive advantage? The school is definitely out as evidenced by this conversation we've been having with James Cherkoff at Modern Marketing.

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Comments

[Mack Collier]

Thanks for the link, I just listened to it and blogged about it as well. I agree, neither Steve nor Rick sounded that impressive, in fact I doubt either of them had read Jack's Forbes article, because:
1 - Rick referenced the Oprah G6 episode as a successful WOM campaign, when Jack also referenced it in his Forbes article as an example of a NON-successful WOM campaign, since it didn't increase sales. Rick sheepishly agreed.
2 - Jack repeatedly said that his point in the Forbes article was that 'WOM is one of many tools available to you'. That was NOT his main point, it was something he mentioned in passing at the end of an article where he spent all his time attacking the crediblity of WOM and viral marketing. Again, the fact that neither Steve nor Rick called him on this, suggests to me that neither of them actually read Jack's article.

Which would be hilarious, since Steve blogged about it the same day it was put up on Forbes.com. I listened for 20 mins, and didn't hear any marketing wisdom from any of them, just a bunch of canned replies that you can find 100 times on any of their blogs.