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The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing: How to Trigger Exponential Sales through Runaway Word of Mouth
George Silverman
American Management Association
New York, NY
2001
258 pp.
ISBN 0-8144-7072-6
$17.95 (paperback)
Keywords Marketing strategy, Customers, Decision making
Silverman's knowledge and passion about word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing makes this book relevant and interesting in today's marketplace. In a world where survival increasingly depends on building and developing customer relationships, Silverman outlines the key role of WOM marketing in those relationships, as well as its role in the marketing and promotional mixes. Silverman brings the lost art of WOM marketing into the twenty-first century by using current case studies and suggesting strategies for developing a WOM marketing campaign. Overall, The Secrets of Word-ofMouth Marketing is practical, usable, and easy to read.
An important early observation is that "getting people to talk often, favorably, to the right people in the right way about your product is far and away the most important thing that you can do as a marketer" (p. 6). Silverman suggests that WOM marketing is capable of increasing sales tenfold. As such, marketing messages should focus on generating WOM as a goal. WOM represents the way in which customers make decisions and talk to their friends about a product. It should be considered a separate part of the marketing mix - independent of advertising, sales promotion, public relations, personal selling, and direct marketing. Although independent of these more traditional media, WOM should be sparked by these traditional media.
Chapter 1 - "Dominating your market by shortening the customer decision cycle" -...