Great Word of Mouth Marketing focuses on the following areas: 

1. Feedback & Innovation
2. Business Culture & Structure
3. Collaboration & Relationships
4. Customer Experience Process
5. Analysis & Promotion
6. Customer Education
7. Conversations

Feedback and Innovation:
Q. Where will the idea for your next big selling product or service come from? A. Have you considered asking your customers? 
One night, while channel surfing, I noted the number of buttons on my TV remote. I also had a Foxtel remote and a remote for the surround sound system. Having nothing better to do, i decided to count the number of buttons on all three remotes. 167. Then i counted how mnay buttons i actually used. 10. 
My first question was 'what the hell are the other buttons for'? (I still don't know!)

Not long after, Apple came out with a remote control that could access all technology with much fewer buttons. 
Its important to ask the end user for their feedback on our products or services. Chances are high that they will reccomend a small improvement that will go down a storm in the market place. 
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Customer Education: 
Peter Walstab is the CEO at Excellent Edges. In the hair salon industry, his product is known as the 'Rolls Royce' of the scissor market.
I have asked numerous business owners how much they would pay for a pair of scissors (not from hair salons). The response I usually get is $10-$20. 

Excellent Edges sell scissors for up to $3000 per pair. 

They compete in a market that sells scissors for between $400-$220 a pair, yet they are growing. Why?

Peter realised that 'If there is no education behind a clients purchase decision, what will their decision be based on? 95% of the time it will be based on price and i am unable to compete with cheap foreign imports'.

Sound familiar? 
Q. How are you educating your customer? Are they making use of this education to grow their business? 

 Conversations: 
Windsor one make ceiling moudlings for the buidling industry. 
Following the stock market crash of 2007, demand from the building industry dropped by 60% overnight. To cut costs, the $250,000 budget was cut. Windsor one had to ask themselves, how are we going to sell product when we have a zero marketing budget? 

In every product pack, a note was included 'Call Kurt for a shirt' with a phone number. Initially, installers would call just to see it there was actually someoen called Kurt on the end of the phone. Many were surprised when Kurt answered the phone and sent them a shirt. But thats not all he did. Kurt asked them about what projects the installers were working on, what problems they faced and what would help solve these issues. Word spread. Kurt was a real person and was keen to receive feedback and provide help (and a free shirt). 

Windsor one went from 50 new leads a month on a $250,000 marketing budget to 50 new leads a week on an almost $0 marketing budget. 
The key lesson they learned they summarised as follows: ' Simple open and honest communication wins every time – we didn’t lose a single customer'    


 
   

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Case Study number 1:

How Word of Mouth helped Malnourished Vietnamese children
In 1990, Jerry Sternin was working for ‘Save the Children’, the international Organization that helps Children in Need. The Vietnamese Government had invited them to open a new office in Vietnam to fight malnutrition. However, on arrival he received quite a chilly reception. Not everyone in the Vietnamese government was supportive of his organization. Because of this, he was given just six months to make a difference. Not only did he not speak Vietnamese, but his resources (especially financial) were meager. In his words “we had no idea what we were going to do”.
All the available existing analysis on the local malnutrition problem turned out to be true but useless. Sanitation, poverty and purifying water were projects which would take a long time to get up and running and would not make an immediate impact on the malnourished children.
So Sternin decided on a different approach. He asked the mothers in one village to weigh and measure all of their children. They then examined the results together for any ‘anomalies’. Were there any children who were bigger and healthier than their counterparts and if so what was different?
Sternin identified 3 areas which were making a difference:

• The cultural norm was for two meals per day. The mothers of the healthier children were spreading out the same amount of food and feeding their children four times per day. Small children couldn’t eat large amounts of food like the adults and because of this were not getting enough to eat.
• Some mothers also collected shrimps and small crabs from the rice paddies.
• Another food source was sweet potato greens – considered a low class food – but mixed in with the rice together with some shrimp they supplied a much needed source of protein and vitamins.

This is a real world and sustainable solution but as Sternin observed “knowledge does not change behavior”. So he organized the village into cooking groups which helped the mothers build new habits and gave them hope that their own child could be healthy.
Six months later, over 65% of the kids in 14 villages were better nourished. From this, word spread of its success and eventually this approach spread to a further 265 villages reaching a population of 2.2 million people.
The undoubted success of this project came down to the villager’s communication. In business we need to engage our customers to do the same