A Tipping Point for Word of Mouth Marketing?

Over at Church of the Customer, Jackie Huba notes some interesting press on the launch of a major brand campaign in Australia. Absolut Vodka has introduced a "ready-to-drink" beverage for the coveted urban hipster market in Sydney and Melbourne. The interesting part of this campaign is that word of mouth marketing tactics have completely edged out television advertising spending - which is very significant considering the average spend for similar launch campaigns is around $3 million a pop. Instead, Absolut's agency has focused on targeting key influencers within niche communities with experiences that get people talking. The Sydney Morning Herald notes:

"Absolut has taken out a short lease on two pubs - one in Sydney's Surry Hills, the other in Melbourne's St Kilda - hired bands, DJs and put on a photographic exhibition on life in five state capitals. Visitors to the Absolut Cut bar will get a free bottle of Cut and eventually the public will be given a chance to contribute their photos, generating what Absolut hopes will be a viral element to the campaign."

One of the major drawbacks of a word of mouth campaign, according to the article, is the time it takes to gain traction and critical mass in a manner that truly effects the bottom line in the context of a major branding initiative.

This, I believe, is a rapidly evolving perspective. Splintered, on-demand and portable media channels are already enabling more efficient targeting of niche communities and word of mouth marketing campaigns. Moreover, the redistribution of resources away from traditional broadcast media, to narrowcast, participatory media should facilitate punctuated growth and innovation. 

Cindy Sullivan, of Cymfony's Marketing Insight, points to information from CMO/Jupiter that suggests an emerging media environment characterized by 1) ubiquity of broadband access, 2) audience fragmentation and 3) a steady erosion of customer loyalty (depicted in the graphic below).

I tend to agree with Sullivan, and comments from Life on Silicon, that audience fragmentation can be as much an opportunity as a stumbling block for marketing professionals. As I discussed earlier, innovations such as "clickable video" have emerged on the broadband scene to facilitate a new level of behavioral data collection and granular market research. Not only is niche targeting becoming more powerful and efficient, but P2P platforms, recommender engines, and collaborative media are setting the stage for new marketing tactics that produce rapid, viral penetration of marketing messages and brand experiences.

If the goal is word of mouth endorsement and promotion, however, the onus still falls squarely on marketing professionals to facilitate experiences that harness the inherent passion among key influencers (or customer evangelists) to spread the word. The song remains the same: No matter how closely aligned marketing messages are to the perceived interests of a niche community, without engaging key influencers in a genuine dialogue about the meaning of the intended brand experience, word of mouth campaigns will only plod along in this new and fast-paced world of fragmented media. I'm afraid Absolut will need to do more than simply "build the stage" if they want word of mouth to catch fire. The co-creation of marketing communications in this environment has the potential to truly supercharg word of mouth campaigns - to produce big results, at a clip akin to the mass marketing campaigns of television's heyday. This, to me, is a likely scenario.