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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jay Baer
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May 22 - June 5, 2022
That’s a bit like buying a bicycle when what you need is a motorcycle. Yes, they both have two wheels, a seat, and handlebars. But the moment you take a bicycle out on the highway, you know you’ve made a terrible mistake.
For a couple of bucks, anyone from a Kardashian to a Kewtie Pie will gladly toss up a #sponsored post featuring your product. But any decent word-of-mouth marketer will tell you: Real influencers rarely need to be paid. In fact, most of them can’t be bought. It’s a failure of our profession that so many marketers still don’t get that.
Word-of-mouth impact is usually higher when the information exchanged is specific.
“A USP is a feature, articulated with a bullet point, that is discussed in a conference room. A talk trigger is a benefit, articulated with a story, that is discussed at a cocktail party.”
When offered by consumers to one another, word of mouth is independent, as the talker has no financial interest in the sale of the service. A consumer’s independence adds credibility and persuasiveness to the recommendation. This trust advantage is the key to why word of mouth is so crucial today. Fundamentally, we trust businesses and organizations less than ever, and we trust people more than ever.
We’re in an era where trust matters more than truth, and the truth is that your customers simply don’t trust you as much as they trust each other.
For a differentiator to keep spreading beyond the first telling, however, it has to be inherently more interesting.
The best way to create conversation is to have a selling proposition that is actually unique. After all, same is lame. We are physiologically conditioned to discuss what is different and to ignore average.
when it comes to word of mouth, “different is better than better.”
As Ted Wright told us, “Word of mouth is just talking. Word-of-mouth marketing is the organizing of that talk and driving it in a particular way. It’s doing something intentional.”
All talk triggers shall be: remarkable, relevant, reasonable, and repeatable.
“Anytime you choose to take a different path, you are going to turn some people off. Their expectation was that this business was going to be like this, and if it is slightly outside of that, it’s going to [be unappealing to] some people. But, one of the secrets to many successful brands is they have as many people dislike them as like them,” says John Jantsch.
The most compelling in-store experience in each Umpqua location—the talk trigger—is a silver telephone. But it’s not just any telephone. This special hotline enables any customer to press a single button to be connected directly to the bank president. Not the branch president, but the head of the entire Umpqua operation. That was Ray Davis until he moved to fill the role of executive chairman in 2017, succeeded as president and CEO by Cort O’Haver.
When you overpromise—or even when consumers simply perceive you to be overpromising—it not only depresses participation in the promotion or campaign at hand but also creates a longer-term spillover effect that diminishes brand trust into the future.
Every hotel guest gets a key, and most patrons of hamburger restaurants order fries. Yet Graduate Hotels and Five Guys made a choice. They chose to take a piece of their operational chain that most competitors consider mundane and unimportant and turn it into a talk trigger by making it distinctly, talkably different. As Seth Godin wrote in Purple Cow, “Ask, ‘why not?’ Almost everything you don’t do has no good reason for it.” There is no good reason hotels don’t create conversations through keycards and restaurants don’t through bonus fries. It’s just not typically done. The brands profiled
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A talk trigger should be offered to every customer, every time. The impact of that differentiator is far greater in total, because it is achievable by us all. We can personally experience it. It is a story in which we (or someone we know) are a major character. Jake Sorofman, a vice president at the analyst firm Gartner, noted: “[I]n the game of customer experience . . . consistency will always trump delight.”
Remember: Word of mouth spreads when something occurs that customers do not reasonably expect. Customers do not expect soft drinks to be free at Holiday World, because they have learned over time that a Diet Pepsi is typically $162.75 in an amusement park setting. The gap between expectation and reality is the fuel for the stories that create word of mouth and in turn produce new customers.
The five types of talk triggers are: talkable empathy, talkable usefulness, talkable generosity, talkable speed, and talkable attitude.
In three decades or so, we moved from fax to overnight delivery to email to instant and text messaging to Netflix and “instant everything” via mobile app. At this rate, telepathy is just around the corner. And speed is only one element of consumers’ changing expectations. Simply making things faster at the expense of some other element of your customer experience is not a talk trigger.
At FreshBooks, cofounder Mike McDerment describes how his client services team is systematically empowered to deliver small storytelling moments for customers. “We were following one of our customers on Twitter and we saw that she got stood up for a date. We sent her a bouquet of flowers saying, ‘Hey, we’d never stand you up.’ You sort of can’t plan these things. You gotta be open and then sort of, you know, take action.” At that level of execution, what the FreshBooks team is accomplishing is not quite an actual talk trigger. It actually borders on being a surprise-and-delight stunt, which is
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You cannot possibly know how your customer will interact with your product. Even if you write 993 call scripts, you’ll encounter a 994th scenario quickly.
That shadowy space between what a customer wants and what a customer really wants is the exact space where talk triggers often live. To help illuminate the darkness in that gap, it’s necessary to get as close as possible to the customer.
It’s always nice to end with a final open-ended question of this nature when you’re talking with customers: How do we, as a brand, make you feel today? If the customer’s reply is “not much,” you’ll see clearly how much work you have ahead of you. Nobody talks about products or experiences that don’t leave them feeling something. This is the thing that separates an undifferentiated product benefit from a talk trigger, and it’s a concept that you need to view through a different lens. Sometimes when customers don’t have strong feelings about a brand, we need to revisit just why things might be
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You have to LIVE your talk trigger in every sense. Every team member at DoubleTree by Hilton is massively tuned in to the uniqueness and power of the cookie giveaway at check-in. It’s part of the company’s DNA.
Talk triggers work because they’re subtle and tangible. They’re not designed as quid pro quo referral devices, delivered in exchange for the email addresses of friends and family. They’re genuine experiences, not advertising. This is the precise reason that a word-of-mouth impression drives five times more sales than advertising. But word of mouth and advertising are not mutually exclusive, as we’ve established. Each assists the other,
DoubleTree by Hilton gives guests a warm chocolate chip cookie at check-in because it wants them to feel welcome. Five Guys gives more fries because it wants customers to feel like they got something extra. Performers Penn and Teller greet every guest after a show because they want guests to feel like they are part of a community. What’s your “because” statement? Complete this sentence: We do [TALK TRIGGER] because [REASON]. A story helps to make your talk trigger more personal.
You’d probably be surprised to learn that AWS has a customer commitment that’s hard to beat: When it identifies cost savings, it proactively passes them along to customers in the form of lowered pricing. Imagine you get an email from AWS. You open it. You read it. You discover that your bill henceforth is less, not more. Holy generosity talk trigger!
Secrets are the enemy of word of mouth. Even the famous American burger chain In-N-Out, which is renowned for its “secret” menu, published an entire section of its website describing this secret menu and how to navigate it. This is a “secret” the way that “Mariah Carey lip-synchs on television” is a secret.
Same is lame. Give yourself permission to do something different. Something noteworthy. Something talkable.