UNIVERSITATEA DIN BUCURETI

ADMINISTRAREA AFACERILOR





CREATING BUZZ AND
WORD-OF-MOUTH
ADVERTISING


PROF. COORDONATOR STUDENT
DANA RADLER IRI MIHAELA-LAURA
AN II GR. 204




BUCURETI, 2013
GETTING THE TERMINOLOGY STRAIGHT
Word of mouth: The act of consumers providing information to other consumers.
Buzz marketing: Using high-profile entertainment or news to get people to talk about
your brand.
Buzz marketing: Using high-profile entertainment or news to get people to talk about
your brand.
An entire professional association is devoted to word-of-mouth marketing, called the
Word of Mouth Marketing Association, or WOMMA. For example, just look at a few of the
companies that are members of WOMMA- Coca-Cola, Dell computers, General Motors, Yahoo!.

THE POWER OF WORD-OF-MOUTH
In my opinion, the word of mouth is the most powerful type of exposure that companies
can get for their products or services because for me and I am sure that for many other people, it
is more important what suggeste me one of my friends. Of many times, when my best friend said
me you should see this movie; youll love it! or try this restaurant,or gift shop, or face cream
I could not say no because I was sure that if she liked it I will like it too and every time I
recomended to other friends that product, place or service.
For exemple, when was the first time you considered getting an MP3 player? For most
people, these gadgets became enticing only after hearing a friend or coworker rave about his new
toy. To make this general, we just have to think how many people make travel and vacation
plans based on what people they know recommend or buy cars because of buzz about a particular
style. So, word-of-mouth is used by all of us even if we dont realise, it became an usual and
simple way to make advertising about a particular product or service.







EXAMINING WORD-OF-MOUTH MARKETING SUCCESS STORIES
If we glance at the big companies, we will see that they surely know how to use this free
method of advertising and it seems to be a succesful one.
When we tink about the types of products that people tend to buzz about I think the most
considerable are the movies and the books.
But how buzz contribute to the success of books. Here are two examples: Cold Mountain by
Charles Frazier and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells.
Interestingly, word of mouth was responsible for the enormous success of each book, but
the buzz on the two books happened in very different ways: One was top-down, and the other
was bottom-up.
In the case of Cold Mountain, the buzz was driven from the top-down. The book started
to sell as soon as it was published, but it became a bestseller because the publisher wrote
personal letters to key booksellers and sent copies to people he thought would be key readers
(and therefore had big mouths).
In the case of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, the book didnt sell particularly
well at first. It got a few good reviews and sold a modestly successful number of copies in the
original hardcover edition. When the book came out in paperback, though, the author noticed
that groups of women would come to bookstores to have her sign their copies, and they were
buying several copies of the book for their friends. What had happened was that readers had
identified with the theme of the book and were reading it in bookclubs, and those communities
started to buzz. That word-of mouth groundswell caused the book to sell 2.5 million copies.
The movies are also a good example, as I already said, because there are a lot of sites
where the people after they saw a movie can noted them or just talk about them, inform other
who want to see that movie. So, this become a form of buzz that sometimes can be a negative
one because the personalities of people are different and if I liked The sixth sense, maybe a
stranger will hate it.





THE POWER OF NEGATIVE BUZZ!
The power and speed of the Internet increase everyday the risk of negative buzz and it is
known that an unhappy customer is more powerful than an happy one. For example, it happend
to me after I buyed an mp4 player to change the graphics and I informed all of my friends to
avoid that brand.
In the early 1990s there was a problem with Intels Pentium chip. Someone found a small
error in the chip, and news about it spread furiously fast on the Internet, so fast that Intel couldnt
contain it and didnt remedy it fast enough. That negative buzz cost the company $475 million in
write-offs.

TIPS AND TECHNIQUES ON GENERATING BUZZ

Inventing a great new phrase
Is well known that many great ad campaigns were successful because they created a new
expression that people started using in everyday life and conversation.
One way to coin a new phrase is to turn your businesss or products name into a verb.
For example, Google.com, an Internet search engine youre probably familiar with. People now
talk about I googled it to find out more about it. . . . So now, when someone needs to look
something up on the Internet, Google.com is probably one of the first search engines to come to
mind.
Taking advantage of celebrity endorsements
For example, Richard Laermer cites how Sandra Bullock became a one-woman
marketing machine for Listerine PocketPaks (those little tab-sized breath strips that were
introduced in 2005) when she talked about them nonstop at the Oscars in 2002.
Hitting the streets
Another way to promote buzz is to take your product or service literally to the streets: to
pound pavements where people are out and about, walking and driving. For example, Richard
Laermer recommends doing such simple and low-budget advertising as putting stickers on every
lamppost to build awareness of your brand.

Figuring out where to find your big mouths
For example, Malcolm Gladwell offers insight on this, too, by way of a great example.
He writes how a nurse in San Diego wanted to make more black women aware of and
knowledgeable about diabetes and breast cancer. She began in what she thought was the right
place, by targeting black churches, but she found that the women who stayed after services were
already knowledgeable, and the rest of the congregations just wanted to get home. So she
thought about finding a place where black women would have more time and be more relaxed
and therefore be more open to receiving information, and she realized that the best place for her
to generate word of mouth was at the beauty salon. So she taught hairdressers to be her mavens,
her big mouths, and she generated the buzz she wanted in order to educate women about these
diseases and to encourage them to get mammograms and find out even more about how they can
protect themselves.
Creating a blog about your business
Maybe this strategy is something that could work for your business, ifyour target market
spends a lot of time on the Internet, but I think it is also a dangerous one because it offer too
more freedom of a wide group of people to talk about our service or product even if they didnt
use it, so they dont say everytime the truth.