Since Zavee is a marketing platform for small and medium sized businesses, we think a lot about word of mouth (“WOM”) marketing. It’s a powerful and cost-effective tool, which makes it ideal for businesses that don’t have big marketing budgets. It’s also a natural fit for smaller businesses, whose owners inherently are closer to their customers than than in large enterprises. And with its focus on organically spreading a marketing message WOM encompasses (and perhaps even spawned) social media marketing – something else we think a lot about at Zavee. We aren’t the only ones thinking about WOM, of course. There is a WOM trade association, some major conferences, several blogs on the subject and more than a few books.

One of the things that caught our attention as we were developing Zavee was the inherent fragility of WOM, especially from the perspective of the smaller business. In our conversations with small business owners, we learned that they think of WOM as a cycle: a positive customer experience leads to a personal recommendation, which leads to a new customer, and so on. They aren’t quite as focused – yet – on influencer marketing, buzz marketing or other categories of WOM as larger companies might be. There’s no doubt, however, that personal recommendations are powerful drivers of new business. One global consumer study indicated that 90% of consumers trusted recommendations from people they knew. What makes WOM fragile, however, is how easily the connections that make up the WOM cycle can fail.


The very beginning of the cycle – the business providing the kind of experience that makes customers want to recommend it – gets a lot of attention, but in a way that’s the easy part. At least, it’s the part of the cycle over which the merchant has the most control.

The next step is much more problematic. The customer leaves with every intention of recommending the merchant. But like most emotional drives, it will remain top of mind for only so long. At some point the intention to recommend the business will dissipate, or be crowded out by other things, so it’s vital that the customer encounter a potential recipient of the recommendation before this point is reached. Some customers will reach out to specific acquaintances to make a recommendation while others will wait until they encounter an acquaintance serendipitiously or are solicited for a recommendation.

Then there is the issue of the person who receives the recommendation. Obviously, it must be someone with whom the customer is acquainted. But personal acquaintance isn’t enough. For the recommendation to have the desired impact the recipient of the recommendation must:

• Have confidence in the customer generally as someone whose recommendations would be reliable – no one would act on the recommendations of someone they think is a flake
• Have confidence in the customer specifically as someone who is knowledgeable and experienced in the relevant domain – if the customer knows about wine but not shoes her recommendation of a wine shop will be more powerful than her recommendation of a shoe store
• Be able to understand the reason for the recommendation – this isn’t always an issue, and the intensity of the recommendation can count for a lot, but it certainly helps if the customer can effectively convey the merchant’s selling proposition
• Be at the point of intention – the recommendation will be more powerful if the recipient of the recommendation is ready, willing and able to buy than if she has to remember the recommendation later on, when the emotional drive that she has “borrowed” from the customer has dissipated or been crowded out

As much as anything else, it’s timing that makes WOM fragile. If our hypothetical customer is solicited for a recommendation within the scope of her expertise by an acquaintance who is at the point of intention, the recommendation should be very powerful – unless the customer no longer remembers her experience so intensely or so favorably. If she reaches out to an acquaintance to recommend a merchant while her experience is still top of mind, that recommendation should be powerful, too – unless the acquaintance has just made a purchase from a different merchant or otherwise is not at the point of intention.

In a future post, we’ll discuss some things that merchants can do to make the WOM cycle stronger, and we’ll also describe how Zavee can help. In the meantime, let us know what you do to make WOM work for you.