By Lewis I. Rice

When you walk into an International House of Pancakes at 3 a.m., anything can happen. Even word-of-mouth marketing.

Not long ago, a student taking Walter Carl's Word-of-Mouth, Buzz, and Viral Marketing Communication class had a middle-of-the-night carb craving, so off he went to IHOP. As he paid his bill, the cashier asked what the Zipcard on his friend's keychain was all about. The question prompted a conversation about Zipcar, a car-sharing service that may, in fact, prove useful to a graveyard-shift worker at an all-night restaurant.

The discussion was natural and unplanned. Most likely, no one at Zipcar ever found out about it, unless a company employee happened to be enjoying some Pigs in Blankets at a nearby booth. Word of mouth is just ordinary folks talking to ordinary folks about stuff they use and like.

And it happens a lot. During the time he was taking the class, Carl's student kept count of all the spontaneous chats he had about an organization, a brand, a product, or a service. They numbered around twenty-five a day. According to Carl's research, this is close to average for most college students.

Carl, an assistant professor in the communication studies department, can reel off such statistics because word of mouth has become the focus of his academic work. Through his classes, research, and writing, he studies and explains informal discussions and social interactions, the mundane moments of life that are, nevertheless, rich fodder for scholarly analysis.

And commerce, as the Zipcard discussion demonstrates. Zipcar knows this. That's why it gives its customers a card displaying its logo as opposed to, say, a generic key. The company hopes to inspire a chat that may recruit yet another customer.

People may be increasingly disillusioned about government and other institutions, but they find word-of-mouth messages increasingly credible. In one 2005 study, 92 percent of respondents said they saw word of mouth as their best source for product ideas, up from 67 percent in 1977. As a result, companies are taking more active steps to enter—some would say manipulate—everyday discussions, to attract potential consumers.

As consumers tune out or skip over much of traditional advertising, word of mouth has become industry's next frontier. Some people aren't happy about this. Others, like a Northeastern professor whose work has generated its own share of buzz, are trying to understand how this kind of marketing works, and what it portends.

Under the influence
Asked for a definition of word of mouth, Carl cites a classic one devised about forty years ago by Johan Arndt, a Norwegian business professor: "Oral person-to-person communication between a receiver and a communicator whom the receiver perceives as noncommercial concerning a brand, a product, or a service."

Of course, people have been employing word of mouth ever since they learned how to use their mouths. A caveman telling his neighbor about a good hunting ground was doing pretty much the same thing as someone recommending a steakhouse to his golf partner. Today, Arndt's classic definition has expanded to include the online world of blogs, message boards, and e-mail.

But more structured attempts at word-of-mouth marketing, which Carl defines as "the idea of providing tools and resources for consumers to engage in word-of-mouth activities," go back only about five years.

As in any young field, the terminology is still a little fluid. "Buzz marketing," for instance, means different things to different people. For his part, Carl makes a distinction between "everyday" and "institutional" word of mouth. The conversation at the IHOP was everyday word of mouth, a completely random encounter. Buzz marketing, on the other hand, is the label Carl applies to institutional word of mouth, set in motion by an organized campaign, perhaps, or a buzz agent with some corporate tie.

Viral marketing—creating something entertaining for people to pass on, usually electronically, that will be identified with a product—is a buzz-marketing technique. So are product seeding, or giving out samples to raise a product's visibility, and influencer marketing, or finding people to talk about a product and persuade others to use it.

An example of the latter is Chrysler's 300C Influencer Program. On behalf of the automaker, a marketing company recruited via telephone or at upscale shopping malls people who had a wide social circle and were willing to spend $35,000 on a new car. The recruits attended a launch event for the Chrysler 300C with company executives.

Then Chrysler lent the car for six days to about a hundred participants, who knew what was expected of them, as evidenced by what one told the company: "Smart marketing on your part to gain greater grass-roots exposure to the vehicle." And the campaign seemed to work, according to another participant's testimonial: "People have accused me of sounding as if I worked for Chrysler."

He didn't, nor did any of the other influencers who spread the word about a product in which they had no vested interest. Their only compensation was a few days of driving a car they couldn't keep (unless, of course, they wanted to buy it). You might think these high-income, high-status people with large social circles would have better things to do.

But that underestimates the allure of being an insider, says Carl. An influencer's rationale, he says, is often as simple as "Because I'm doing this, I'm going to be seen as someone who's cool. It says something about me that I'm the one who is the first to know."

Power to the people
Marketing companies contend that word-of-mouth experiences benefit the consumer. "Our work empowers people and gives them a voice," touts a publication of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, a trade group for which Carl serves as an advisory board member.

An opposing point of view can be found on the Web in a self-published article called "Sales Pitch Society II," in which Kate Kaye, a writer who covers advertising and the media, critiques buzz-marketing practices and consumers who willingly participate in them. Participants "are facilitating their own exploitation, merely because marketers have asked them to," she writes, pointing to "empty lives" as a motivator.

Yet Carl notes that people often spread the word about a product or a service for completely unselfish purposes. "A lot of the motivation for word of mouth is altruism," he says. "They want to help other people and either make sure they don't make a mistake or they have a positive experience."

Also, Carl argues, word of mouth gives consumers power, and companies that seek consumer participation have to accept this power's consequences. For instance, when Chevrolet asked consumers to create their own videos about its Tahoe model, people responded, but not always with the kind of viral marketing the company was hoping for. Several participants lampooned the SUV for harming the environment.

Walter Carl (center)
Photo by Tracy Powell

It shows, says Carl, that companies launching a word-of-mouth campaign should be convinced their product can withstand the scrutiny. Chevrolet ceded power to the masses, and the masses spoke. If the company listens, it might decide to develop a more environmentally friendly car.

In reality, though, the consumer empowerment celebrated by word-of-mouth marketers only goes so far, Carl cautions.

"I think the amount of power someone has in the [word-of-mouth] model is more limited than in the other ways people can be powerful," he says. Also, "if you're going to choose to exercise your power about something, maybe you want to do it for something that's more socially beneficial than a washing detergent."

Word of mouth has been used to promote some social causes, notably by the group MoveOn.org, which asks members—now numbering more than three million—to spread the word about progressive causes in their communities and to their elected officials. Word of mouth works on the other side of the aisle, too. Republican organizational efforts, particularly those that identified influencers like conservative church leaders, helped tilt the 2004 presidential election, says Carl.

And the technique is successful in academia. When Carl's class wasn't included in a Northeastern course catalog, he launched his own marketing campaign. Initially, only four students signed up. He contacted those students and asked them to tell their friends about his course. Ultimately, eighteen people took the class.

Carrie Tropeano was one student who heard the buzz from a friend and signed up. Now, along with two classmates, the junior communication-studies major is writing a chapter for a book put out by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association on measuring word of mouth, and she may be interested in joining the field after she graduates. Carl, she says, "did a great job of letting us get actual experience in the field."

One practical assignment had the students fashioning a word-of-mouth campaign for their own university. They served as consultants for Brian Kenny, Northeastern's vice president for marketing and communications, who came to class to hear their ideas for promoting school athletics and alumni relations. Proposals included having students create a viral Web campaign by making videos about what being part of the Northeastern community means to them.

Kenny says Carl's students' presentations compared favorably with those from professional consulting firms he's hired. And, a longtime marketing expert himself, he's happy to offer his own word-of-mouth assessment of the scholar who allowed him to tap the wisdom of his class.

"I think he's a rising young star in Northeastern's faculty," Kenny says of Carl. "He represents the best of what's happening at Northeastern, where we have faculty engaged in interesting and innovative areas of research. And this is certainly one of them."

Full disclosure
Carl has been cited on the topic of word of mouth in major publications, including the Village Voice, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Inc. magazine, and Advertising Age. Nonetheless, he's a relative newcomer to the marketing world.

In 2001, he earned a PhD in interpersonal and small-group communication from the University of Iowa. This was followed by a teaching stint in communications at his undergraduate college, Rochester Institute of Technology, while his wife, Meredith Cohen, pursued her PhD in psychology at Northeastern (she got her degree in August). In 2002, Carl accepted a tenure-track position with Northeastern's communication studies department and joined his wife in Boston.

His interest in word of mouth was sparked when he heard a radio-news segment on BzzAgent, a Boston-based company that recruits people to talk about products within their social networks. Carl wanted to know more about how the agents combine their personal relationships and product marketing.

For a Management Communication Quarterly article called "What's All the Buzz About?" he surveyed buzz-marketing agents on their communication practices, such as their relationship to the people with whom they engage in word-of-mouth (WOM) experiences. He found that "effective WOM and buzz marketing is not rooted in the marketing of a particular brand, product, or service, but rather is based in the everyday relationships and conversations of people discussing other matters."

Furthermore, he writes, "the talk that is not about brand-related products and services lays an important foundation for brand-related talk."

Carl also studied how the BzzAgent model handles disclosure, one of the more controversial aspects of word-of-mouth marketing. Although the Word of Mouth Marketing Association decries "tactics related to manipulation, deception, infiltration, or dishonesty," some industry insiders consider nondisclosure of an agent's ties to a buzz campaign more profitable than disclosure.

It's easy to understand why. Suppose an attractive woman offers a smoke to a man in a bar, then tells him she represents the cigarette company—wouldn't that kill the buzz? As Andrew and Jack Kaikati write in a California Management Review article called "Stealth Marketing: How to Reach Consumers Surreptitiously," "Stealth marketing attempts to catch people at their most vulnerable by identifying the weak spot in their defensive shields."

But, according to Carl's research, honesty is actually the best policy. He found that when agents disclose their participation in a campaign, their conversation partners are more likely to pass on the brand information to others. Disclosure leads to a feeling of trustworthiness, Carl believes, and avoids the backlash that can happen if a deception is discovered. Most people, upon hearing that the person they're speaking with is participating in a word-of-mouth campaign, consider it a nonissue or even a positive, he says.

In a disclosure of his own, Carl reveals his study was funded in part by BzzAgent. Though he acknowledges that objectivity questions may arise in such academic-industry collaborations, he says the integrity of his research was not compromised: "I'm obligated to report all the results of the study, whether they're flattering to the company or not."

According to Dave Balter, BzzAgent founder and president, the results of Carl's study showed the company it had made the right decision when it changed its policy to require, rather than recommend, that agents disclose their affiliation.

"His research on disclosure has been some of the most fascinating in the entire industry," Balter says. "He basically proved the thesis that being open and honest in an organized word-of-mouth campaign is better, and helps extend the value of word of mouth."

The BzzAgent model engenders more scrutiny shan any other word-of-mouth marketing effort, Carl says. Overall, he maintains, word-of-mouth critics don't give enough credit to the audience. No matter what a company does, people will still have a chance to form their own opinion about its products.

Carl says his students, like most young people, largely accept and understand word-of-mouth marketing. "Just because a company gives them a product, they don't feel like they're going to have to talk about it," he explains. "In some ways, the younger generation is pretty savvy about this stuff." It's certainly a significant part of their lives: Carl's studies show that 17.5 percent of conversations engaged in by college students ages eighteen to twenty-nine include talk about an organization, a brand, a product, or a service.

As a result, the young buzz agents in Carl's class seem not to share the concerns they've heard him voice about the "commercialization of chitchat" or the "corporate colonization of the life world."

Tropeano says, "Although I think word-of-mouth marketing will definitely play a huge role in the marketing industry in the future, I don't see it becoming so overwhelmingly present that it alters how people think about their conversations every day."

Word on the street
Near the end of this spring's Word-of-Mouth class, Carl told his students he might have learned more about a store named Johnny Cupcakes than he cared to admit.

In fact, "Johnny Cupcakes" became a catch phrase in the class, an exemplar of how buzz can make even an expensive Newbury Street T-shirt shop a mini pop-culture phenomenon, the place to be and buy if you're young and stylish, and have disposable income.

But, unlike many of his students, Carl had never actually visited Johnny Cupcakes until he took a field trip there in August. Once inside the store, designed to look like a bakery, he recognized a trend—creating an experience for the consumer. In the same way that Build-A-Bear Workshop mesmerizes the tricycle set, Johnny Cupcakes entertains their older, hipper siblings.

In addition, Johnny Cupcakes has copied the ultimate mainstream sales concept, encouraging people to host at-home "Cupperwear" parties, where customers can buy—and talk about—the wares. This approach works for a wide variety of products, Carl notes. A Korean marketing company once recruited housewives to prepare a brand of bacon at house parties as a way of introducing a food unfamiliar to the culture. According to Carl, the campaign reached about 60,000 women, with 58 percent purchasing the product.

Unlike bacon or teddy-bear hawkers, however, Johnny Cupcakes relies on exclusivity to interest consumers. Carl points to a $38 limited-edition T-shirt that reads "34 of 300." Such a product inspires an "implicit sense of community," he says.

He is obviously on to something—a few minutes later a Johnny Cupcakes employee says virtually the same thing. "If you make it more exclusive, if you make it more expensive, people want it more," explains sales associate Matt Kildoff.

The store wants to preserve that sense of cool. Kildoff says the owner will allow other stores to sell Johnny Cupcakes products only if they demonstrate a passion for selling the brand, for becoming, if you will, evangelists. Someone in Carl's class was such an evangelist, helping to sell

T-shirts with no financial interest other than the psychic income of getting classmates to follow her recommendation.

"I had no idea what Johnny Cupcakes was," a fellow student posted in response to a blog entry written by the store enthusiast. "However, since you were so excited to share with us your experience, I can't wait to go in there."

Though this exchange happened online, most word of mouth happens face to face, Carl says. And sometimes in the most unlikely of places, as a December 2004 New York Times Magazine article on the buzz-agent phenomenon demonstrates. According to one of the article's anecdotes, a woman told a relative about a new cosmetic product she was using below her eyes—in an exchange that happened at her grandfather's wake.

It's hard not to read this as a warning about the encroachment of brand marketing into our most intimate moments. Then again, the woman's eye-gel recommendation could also be a normal conversational response to a comment about how good she was looking despite the sad occasion.

In his research, Carl found most word-of-mouth exchanges fall under a category called "Life/Living" (one of fifteen categories described). For many people, these exchanges may make life better, even at a relative's wake. As Carl writes, "WOM allows people to make sense of their world, their place in it, and the rightness of their views."

Carl takes note of word-of-mouth episodes in his own life. Someone once asked him how a word-of-mouth marketing campaign would work for floor cleaners. As it happens, he and his wife have discussed products for just that use and feel strongly about which work best. They don't intend to become evangelists for their favorite cleaning products. But if the time were right, Carl says, they probably would be willing to offer their opinions.

"I think sometimes people underestimate that certain types of products and things we see as pretty mundane actually make a difference in a small way," he says.

When two intellectual PhDs are inspired to share their experience with floor wax, it's clear you'll never know when—and from whom—you'll hear the buzz.

Lewis I. Rice, MA'96, is a freelance writer living in Arlington, Massachusetts. He profiled assistant audiology professor/ rock-band frontman Michael Epstein, PHD'04, in the Fall issue.

Super Marketing

In his Word-of-Mouth, Buzz, and Viral Marketing Communication class, Walter Carl highlights five effective word-of-mouth (WOM) campaigns. From a program that encouraged teens not to smoke to one that encouraged adults to drink wine, the list illustrates the range of efforts WOM can be used to promote.

Rage Against the Haze. A South Carolina company called Brains on Fire worked with state health officials to recruit teenagers to talk to their peers about the dangers of tobacco use. "If you want to think for yourself and not fall victim to [the tobacco industry's] creepy plotting, then you're one of us," the company told teens. The program included "festiVirals" at popular gathering spots where young people could share the message. According to Brains on Fire, a 2005 study showed South Carolina enjoyed one of the largest drops in teen smoking in the nation after the Rage Against the Haze campaign launched.

20Q by Radica Games. In 2004, Radica Games enlisted BzzAgent to send its high-tech handheld model of the old-fashioned Twenty Questions game to three thousand WOM agents, who shared their opinion with their social circles. The manufacturer initially planned to market to the typical computer-game demographic, sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, until the campaign revealed that men and women thirty-five and older liked it, too. According to a Radica marketing executive, the campaign "generated exactly the kind of word of mouth we were hoping for."

Family Guy. After Fox TV's irreverent animated comedy was canceled in 2002, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment hired marketing firm M80 to recruit fans to tout the show's DVD. M80 created a website that included video clips and a message board, which fans used to encourage Fox to cancel the cancellation and resume production of the show. The network listened. Family Guy returned to television in 2005, and the show remains on the air today.

Discovery Educator Network. Consultants and writers Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba—who have created a blog titled Church of the Customer, devoted to "word of mouth, customer evangelism, and citizen marketers"—worked on a project called Discovery Educator Network, designed to create teacher evangelists for Discovery Education's video streaming service for the classroom. In addition to establishing an online community for educators to discuss teaching resources, which now has more than four thousand users, they also recruited former teachers to spread the word in person at educational technology conferences. "Whether you're selling software or tools for educators, creating a free-minded church inside your own online network is an obvious starting point for your organization's true believers," the authors write.

Vintners Quality Alliance Ontario. Like other word-of-mouth marketing companies, Toronto-based Matchstick does product seeding, in this case for high-end wine from the Ontario vineyards overseen by a regulatory group called Vintners Quality Alliance. Matchstick identified wine enthusiasts who fit the criteria of influencers and invited them to a swanky Toronto location to taste the exclusive wine. The enthusiasts were encouraged to host wine-and-cheese parties in their homes and were later interviewed about their events. According to Carl, though the Wine Council of Ontario didn't release sales figures in the campaign's aftermath, it said purchases of the product increased.

— Lewis I. Rice