I’ve attended two learning sessions recently that reflect a clear trend in marketing practice, and also, happily enough, reinforce our work in building great customer experiences.

The first presentation (sponsored by the local AAF chapter (formerly the Ad Club) was given by Shari Short, Director of Strategic Research at Aloysius Butler & Clark (AB&C!) in Delaware, who talked about social marketing principles and techniques. Short could have been singing right from our songbook, particularly the verses about getting to know your audience through deeper, qualitative means rather than relying on straight data and demographics – too often the approach for marketing efforts. She emphasized behavioral change as a goal worth measuring, over information exchange alone. Here are the principles she advocates for social marketing:

1. Know your audience. Dig deeper.

2. Awareness is not the same as action. Think education.

3. What’s in it for them? Think benefits.

Social Marketing (not to be confused with social media) is more process than event.

We were glad to see that Short, too, uses Prochaska’s Stages of Change model (a subject of a future blog post, I think) as a way to describe the process of helping an unaware customer become a loyal customer.

Her psychology background showed as she focused on key emotional drivers for their customer work: attitudes, socials norms, facts, fear. Campaigns that do this well Short cites (not done by AB&C!) are these wonderful anti-smoking PSAs from the California Department of Health Services.

While Short brushed upon infrastructure changes within an organization to address more holistic needs of the customer – the problem we aspire to solve for our clients – she mostly showed ad campaign work as solutions. I wish she had gotten deeper into the meat of solving organizational problems.

Short also cited focus groups as the primary source of qualitative audience research, as opposed to the contextual and generative research methods we are persuing. Our Empathy work is focused on uncovering not only expressed customer needs, but also unarticulated needs that can lead to bigger product/service innovations.

A few days later I was invited to attend a Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing workshop at a client’s headquarters with Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking and CEO of Gaspedal, a WOM consulting firm in Chicago.

Sernovitz is a great advocate and educator for the WOM philosophy and techniques. WOM is all about scale and the multiplier effect, how to use the human network to get your message across. The most important metric is: How many people will one person tell?

He too presented several ideas that helped us feel our work was on track:  The medium for WOM is people, Sernovitz emphasized that the cost of customer service is much higher than the cost of providing a good customer experience (by a factor of 100:1)… making the ROI of a good Customer Experience Strategy self evident.

Sernovitz’s three-step WOM practice goes like this:

1. It’s about your value: Give people a reason to talk (in a Purple Cow kind of way), be remarkable

2. It’s about their desire to belong: Make it easy for the conversation to take place and continue

3. It’s about them feeling good: Make them feel good, smart, proud, and have fun

Other ideas he presented that we encourage:

1. Work smart and fail fast

2. Regularly listen and respond to customers

3. Commit to being part of the conversation about your company

An interesting point about WOM work is that while we have an increasing dependency on talkers who create buzz, the talkers aren’t necessarily buyers. We learned this in a hands-on way in our work with Spout.com, and it has big implications for defining target audiences and influencers.

Sernovitz encouraged our group to think outside of the typical marketing “value” mindset. He showed several YouTube movies that were mostly stunts intended to get people talking – about what, sometimes I wasn’t sure. I suppose this fits the entertainment PR mantra that any news is good news, but I wonder if too much of this kind of thinking can distract us from providing great customer experiences.

Sernovitz was great, but while I found the workshop informative and inspiring, I wondered about the bridge between designing stunts simply to get people talking and doing something genuinely worth talking about.

Both Short and Sernovitz rightly focus on the habits and uniqueness of people, and how a greater awareness of their emotional and social needs help companies better get the word out and serve their customers.

Sernovitz says that “happy customers are the best ads,” to which I’d add that great customer experiences make happy customers.