Empowered Involvement

[The following posting also appeared on the WARC WOM Forum Blog.]

All word of mouth marketing professionals agree that good word of mouth results from the right type of communication with the right type of customers or consumers. Some claim that these have to be influentials. Others, such as Duncan Watts, have found that more easily influencable people might be a better target.

But no matter whom you target in your communication, one aspect often seems strikingly absent from the debate: how does that dialogue actually work? What do you do with these people once you have identified them for your WOM Marketing efforts Should you just pitch ads at them? Ask them to read your corporate blog? Throw parties for them?

At ESCP-EAP European School of Management, we wanted to find an answer to this question. So we went hunting for the drivers of word of mouth: what makes people want to spread the word and what seems to be the trigger that works in a marketing context?

The more word of mouth research you review, the more often you find the term “involvement”. Involvement seems to be key when marketing wants to trigger word of mouth. However, the literature also seems to agree that involvement cannot really be produced. It much more strongly depends on each individual and their personal response to a marketing effort.

But if you look a bit further, into other fields of business studies, you can discover an approach in human resources research that is specifically designed to produce involvement: empowerment in the workplace. Companies have long been interested in getting their employees to be more involved and thus more motivated. That is why researchers have identified those drivers that help create this type of empowerment that gets employees motivated.

So we took a model from human ressources studies and applied it in a marketing context. The findings are encouraging. People involved in a marketing project will produce significantly more and more positive word of mouth than other consumers if:

1. They feel they can have an impact on its outcome;
2. The project is meaningful to them;
3. They feel competent about their contribution; and
4. They have a choice in the way they participate.

We call this form of involvement ‘Empowered Involvement’ and we believe it may serve as an important tool for making better informed decisions about how to conduct WOM Marketing programmes.

But it also highlights a larger idea. Maybe it is rather telling that an approach derived from human resources is finding its way into the marketing field. Maybe it means that the way marketing companies deal with their consumers indeed needs to change, and that there is a genuine benefit in viewing your most important consumers as actual partners whom you want to truly empower within your marketing process. It’s basically the old insight again that we should market with consumers, and not at them.