Case studies in word of mouth marketing

By tids

In this month’s HotHouse podcast, Yooster founder Justin Kirby talks about how the company helped Australian natural healthcare company Blackmores create word of mouth for one of its supplements aimed at arthritis sufferers.

Yooster recruited 1,000 people to try samples of the product, and by the end of the campaign 85% were converted to the product – and all of those converts had told their friends and family and had convinced at least one person to use the product. This niche product, which was not suitable for traditional advertising, had a noticeable lift in sales as a result of the campaign.

There are a large number of case studies in word of mouth marketing available online. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), for example, has compiled a large library. Here are a few success stories from their archives:

  • CareerBuilder.com’s “Age-o-matic” campaign: In the same  vein as “Elf Yourself” and “Yearbook Yourself”, the Age-o-Matic let you upload a photo and answer questions highlighting how much your job sucks. The Age-o-matic then aged the picture to show what you’ll look like if you stay in your soul-sucking job, and let you put a caption on it and email to your friends. It was aimed at supporting the strategy of putting CareerBuilder in the center of the emotional driver of the category - job dissatisfaction, playfully showing how job dissatisfaction prematurely ages people. Running in 2007, the campaign cost US$200,000 to build and nothing to promote, It garnered 50 million media impressions in one month and enjoyed 2 million unique visitors, who spend 4 minutes on average with the tool.

ageomatic

  • Microsoft’s Empty Nester campaign for Windows: Microsoft wanted to reach out specifically to 55-75-year old digital immigrants in their own language. They sponsored a series of technology seminars held on cruise ships, covering topics related to enhancing and extending the holiday experience such as digital photo editing, movie making, blogging, etc. Attendance at the seminars increased 80% over the first six weeks that the program was operated on four pilot ships, resulting in uploads of 30,000 user-generated-content objects and 3,000 new Windows Live IDs during the pilot.
    windows
  • Electrolux influencer campaign in Korea: Forty influencers were chosen at the point of purchase for this high-end vacuum cleaner. They provided feedback on their experience with the product on an online retailer website and set up home demonstrations with their friends. The campaign resulted in more than 20,000 new exposures to the brand, nearly 300,000 page views on the website, and importantly, a tripling of sales of the target product in Korea.
    electrolux
  • NBC’s branded player for Saturday Night Live videos: Tired of SNL videos leaching onto YouTube, NBC hired 360i to develop a word of mouth marketing program that would increase distribution of SNL content within a branded player to connect consumers with the original source of the videos. In addition to the digital publicity outreach, 360i worked optimised the player so that a search for SNL videos would list natural search results from sites that utilised the custom player. According to 360i, digital word of mouth drove 77% of all SNL video interactions (video plays or click-throughs to NBC.com) and 63% daily unique users of the video player, video views reached almost 1 million on multiple days during the campaign, and there were more than 3 million views on the two days following the season finale in 2008.
    snl

For more word of mouth marketing case studies, check out a discussion of case studies involving bloggers in a HotHouse blog posting last month.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,