I presented the results of my research and also how this is being applied in the way trnd organises its Word-of-Mouth Marketing campaigns. Afterwards, we had a very interesting discussion.

One gentleman talked about a company that markets a specific type of lubricant brand, WD40. Normaly, one would think that a lubricant isn’t necessarily something people get all excited about. But he explained that the company had, more or less by accident, managed to develop its own community of fans. He said that they are building very close relationships and dialogues with this community, and this dialogue very much informs the company about what the customers want, and how to adapt the product to their needs. The most remarkable numbers were the following: the company asked its customers about types of usage they can come up with for the brand, and received 360.000 submissions! Out of these, they identified 2000 different usage situations.

And through this group, the company not only gets feedback and insight, but they also launch new products through the community: “They just share it with them, and then it spreads to the rest of the world.” The fan community now has ist own board of directors - all fans themselves, and the company isn’t really involved in running the community, they only provide the platform.

The other interesting story came from Phoenix. A participant explained that community-marketing efforts often take a lot of time, and at her agency, they had found that they could jump-start their community marketing with Twitter. (Which I then demonstrated to the whole audience live and on the spot.) In one example, they had managed to reach 4000 women in the Phoenix region within a very short time span who were all interested in a new medical treatment that they were promoting, all through Twitter. She wanted to know what I thought about such approaches. I had to confess that my Twitter activity had only started a few weeks ago, and that in Germany, Twitter is still overwhelmingly a geek-web2.0-tech-in-crowd thing, so mainstream marketing would still be fairly difficult through Twitter.

All in all, I had a great time at the conference - also because the night before, I already got to hang out with some of the people, and was having lots of fun.

How can we explore in a qualitative approach what the four dimensions of Empowered Involvement mean to the participants in a marketing project? I agree that it will be very useful to investigate how people themselves describe what they feel when they are part of a marketing project - this would a) enable us to better understand how these four conditions may have to be nuanced more precisely, so they really hit the relevant facets in the marketing context, and b) we might find additional factors that allow us to more completely describe the full set of factors that contribute to Empowered Involvement.

Also, he asks how important it is that people believe, from the outset, that the company is actually sincere and authentic in its exchange with the participants in a marketing project. Again, I agree - the participants’ perception of the company’s authenticity, as it is engaging in an Empowered Involvement project, may be an important moderating or mediating factor for the rise of Empowered Involvement. Also, it might be interesting to find out if a company can, should or should not try to “borrow” authenticity: in the study which we are working on, the dialogue and exchange was managed through the word of mouth marketing company trnd. So it may also be interesting to see which role third party providers can play in this context.

We are currently finalising the study that is mentioned at the end of the working paper; it still has a quantitative focus and does not yet address these aspects. But when we conduct new studies about Empowered Involvement, we will take this advice on board - thanks, Walter!

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.

Stimulating positive word of mouth has become one of the key strategies for marketing success. Our research on Empowered Involvement suggests that a very targeted participatory approach to marketing may be a promising solution for this. And it supports the notion that a real paradigm shift in marketing – from a communication approach to an interaction approach – may become the hallmark of early 21st century marketing.

The working paper presents the conceptual thinking behind Empowered Involvement, and a first (early) empirical study. We are looking forward to any kind of feedback - the comments are open! The dissertation will add results from a second and more elaborate study, which will then present a complete picture of how Empowered Involvement works.

Download link for the Working Paper:
Empowered Involvement and Word of Mouth (PDF)