Attend to Face-to-Face Word-of-Mouth

Even in these days of raging social networking, word-of-mouth (WOM) about your store is most likely to be passed on via face-to-face conversations. That finding was described in an Online Media Daily article and comes from a study carried out by New Jersey-based WOM consultants Keller Fay in partnership with Yahoo.
     So here are two tactics for improving retailer profitability:

• Encourage customers to shop with you in groups so you can benefit from what you hear them talking about. Hold special events. Carry enough of a range of items to appeal to different family members. Then while they’re shopping, listen to the group members’ chatter. Have sales staff ask customers for specifics about what they like and areas for improvement. Listening in to group shopping can work for the ecommerce retailer by using tools like ShopTogether Crowd.
• Give shoppers materials they can take away with them as conversation starters to share with family and friends. This is especially useful for newly introduced products and items for which the purchaser incurs monetary and/or self-concept risk. With ecommerce customers, make it easy for the purchaser to send on a URL to others to show off what they’ve bought.

     The Keller Fay/Yahoo study concluded that about 76% of WOM conversations occur face-to-face. The Internet does play a role in these conversations, to be sure, and that role is expected to increase as more members of the millennial generation—the first cohort to have grown up with the Internet—become adult consumers. But for now, the role of the Internet is somewhat limited, with only 15% of the analyzed WOM conversations from 18,500 consumers including information the consumer got online.
     The study findings do reinforce the importance to you of cultivating the influence of market mavens. According to consumer researchers at University of Mannheim and University of Texas-Austin, market mavens are a special type of opinion leader. Rather than considering themselves expert advisors on only certain retail products and services, market mavens counsel others about the whole shopping experience and recommend specific stores. Because market mavens generally belong to many social groups, they could be called “Conversation Catalysts.” That’s the name the Keller Fay/Yahoo people coined.

Click below for more:
Encourage Group Shopping
Gather Comments from Your Customers
Encourage Specifics & Criticism in Word-of-Mouth
Satisfy Each Customer’s Self-Concept
Have Post-Sale Product Literature
Build Buzz with Market Mavens