Talking point

There’s nothing quite like advertising to propel the brand value of a product. But that costs money. Loads of it. Also, amidst all the cacophony of advertising, attention spans are waning. So how does one make a dent with the consumer? Simple. By relying on word of mouth. With quirky humour and loads of ‘cool’ quotient, this technique is proving quite a hit.
A recent report by McKinsey — ‘A New Way to Measure Word of Mouth Marketing’ — says the same thing.That “consumers, overwhelmed by choice, are tuning out the ever-growing barrage of traditional marketing.” Word of mouth can sometimes sell more than traditional advertising and marketing. For example, when the iPhone was launched in Germany, the report says “sales directly attributable to word of mouth outstripped those attributable to Apple’s paid marketing”. Six times over.
According to Professor M M Monipally, who teaches communication at IIM-Ahmedabad, it is because all advertising is so exaggerated that it becomes unbelievable. “A company gets 10 seconds to pass on its message so it’s forced to do it. But every time an advertiser says you dip your shirt in a bucket of my detergent and it’ll come out better than new, my wife’s reaction is, ‘That’s so stupid’.”
Therefore, says the McKinsey report, what consumers are instead listening to is word of mouth — what they’re told by friends and family. And that it “cuts through the noise quickly and effectively”.
Could a company then establish itself and grow, using only this medium while eschewing traditional advertising and marketing? Ironically, two graduates of the Mudra Institute of Communication, Ahmedabad, who went on to work with an advertising firm in Delhi say ‘yes’. Rahul Anand and Rajat Tuli are co-owners of Happily Unmarried which sells quirky items from 60 stores around the country and also sells to the UK, France, Australia and the UAE. In the early 2000s, like anybody else who’d wearied of the employer-employee relationship, Anand and Tuli decided to set up this store. The decision to not advertise was made simply because they did not have the money for it. “We decided,” says Anand, “that we would turn our packaging into our advertising. In every brown box that left our store, we put writing or pictures.”
The writing was quirky in the company’s signature style. They have a foot mat which says ‘Beware of The Wife’. While some people may think this rude, it “connected” with buyers. Sometimes better than the products themselves. Anand says people often kept the packaging even after the product was discarded.
It also helped, he adds, that the products were small. “People tend to talk about the small things they discover,” says Anand. What he means is nobody is ever going to talk about a Nike store they might have discovered. “And because of that,” he says, “word of mouth helps level the playing field between the big boys and the small fry.”
Another ex-advertising executive who has so far not used big advertising is Ranjiv Ramchandani, who cut away in 1997 from his job in Mumbai to start Tantra T-shirts. He says he that if he could afford it, he would advertise, but that at the moment, “it would drive him bankrupt”. Ramchandani too puts humour-filled writing with an India-connect on his T-shirts, his packaging and his wash care labels. A cheaper range of his T-shirts is called Loose Motions. “We’re desi cool,” he says.
This quirkiness and humour, says Monippally, are the qualities that get these companies talked about, helping them in the absence of advertising. And these rules do not change as companies get bigger and begin to advertise. They will still require a certain set of qualities in order to get noticed. And it is because of those qualities — a certain coolness, trust — that Harley Davidson has clubs built around its motorcycles and Apple has fan boys with their slavish devotion to every new iProduct.
That “certain something” is not easily defined. Gopal Kaushik’s pub in Manali, The Lazy Dog, for example, gets talked about because he did what the rest of us can only aspire to. Riding through the mountain town on a bike trip, he decided to chuck up his big city life in Mumbai, stay back and start what is now fondly referred to as The Dog.
The alleged power of word of mouth, however, has not yet cut into the amount of money spent on advertising in India. Over the last five years, according to a Pitch-Madison report, ad spend on average has increased by 10.3% over the last four years, while in 2011 alone, it was Rs 25,594 crore.
But the influenece of word of mouth will probably grow, says the McKinsey report, because of internet and social media. That because of them, “word of mouth is no longer an act of intimate, one-on-one communication. Today, it also operates on a one-to-many basis”.
“It’s free,” says Ramchandani, “which means a consumer will talk about your product or service only if he likes it.” Therefore, it is much more effective, he says. But he also warns that what is said about you will finally depend on the quality of your product. If you begin to cut corners, or don’t deliver on the promises you made, word of mouth will only start to work against you.