Talk Triggers: The Complete Guide to Creating Customers with Word of Mouth

by Jay Baer

The late Will Koch, son of the founder and president of the park until his death, used to say, “When everybody else zigs, we zag.” He always issued that as a challenge, recalls Director of Communications Paula Werne. “What can we do differently that isn’t the way everybody else does it?” Just because everybody else does it doesn’t make it wrong, but what can we do differently that will get us that attention and endear us to people?

We’ve talked about the importance of being remarkable. We know through the great work of Holiday World and FreshBooks why talk triggers need also be relevant. The third criterion for a differentiator to be a talk trigger is for it to be reasonable.

Be Reasonable

Giving away 276 cars is big. Too big. You’re not Oprah. When Oprah gives away a few hundred vehicles, she can do so with nearly no skepticism created

if you don’t have that historical relationship with customers, prospects, and fans and you launch a differentiator that uses its scope and grandeur as the conversation-starter, you risk failure. Customers are suspicious when businesses promote something that seems too good to be true, because they’ve learned that it often is.

What does this mean? Your talk trigger has to be simple and reasonable. To “be reasonable” is the third criterion that needs to be present for a differentiator to be a talk trigger.

You’re looking for the habitable “Goldilocks Zone,” where the temperature is just right: a talk trigger that’s remarkable enough to be a conversation catalyst but reasonable enough to be trusted. In an actual conversation, if someone hearing about your talk trigger says that “it’s amazing,” you’re on the right track. Conversely, if he or she says tha...

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 spillove...

sometimes you don’t even have to be different. You just have to be a tiny bit “more.” That’s the talk trigger of one of America’s favorite burger and fries purveyors, Five Guys Enterprises.

The chain excels because of its slavish devotion to customer experience, aided by a commitment to simple, repeatable operations and a dedication to being different.

Sold in two varieties, salted and Cajun, the fries at Five Guys are generally understood to be outstanding. But even if Five Guys french fries aren’t your favorite fast-food tuber, just about everyone discusses the chain’s talk trigger: Giving customers extra fries with their order.

Order a small serving of fries at Five Guys, and you receive enough fries to be credibly described as large. A medium order often solicits a “Wow, that’s a lot of fries” comment. And a large serving of fries? Absurd, unless you’re feeding a high school hockey team or a mining crew.

As Seth Godin wrote in Purple Cow, “Ask, ‘why not?’ Almost everything you don’t do has no good reason for it.”

These aren’t grand gestures, however. The costs for the custom keycard is baked into the room rate, and the size of the fries (including bonus taters) is priced into the menu. These are not “you all get a car” moments; they are small, realistically accomplished tweaks that create big conversations.

the fourth condition that a differentiator needs to meet to be a talk trigger: It has to be repeatable. Let’s investigate why and how that matters,

Be Repeatable

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.

“[I]n the game of customer experience . . . consistency will always trump delight.”

Robbin Phillips and her coauthors described the importance of consistency in The Passion Conversation: “The goal of any business should be to make word of mouth marketing operationally invisible. That is, it should be how a business does business not just one day, but every day.”

To be a talk trigger, and to work for your business every day and not just one day, a differentiator has to be repeatable. It’s not for randomly selected customers. Or your best customers. It’s for all customers.

The Five Types of Talk Triggers

the psychological binding agent—among the talk triggers that work?”

Remember: Word of mouth spreads when something occurs that customers do not reasonably expect.

The gap between expectation and reality is the fuel for the stories that create word of mouth and in turn produce new customers.

When we dug deeper into what and when word of mouth works best, we realized that it’s really about asking, Where can businesses most reliably exceed customer expectations powerfully enough that those customers are compelled to share their experiences?

five types of talk triggers from which every business can select those that are the best fit with their oper...

five types of talk triggers are: talkable empathy, talkable usefulness, talkable generosity, talkable...

If we look again at the 4-5-6 system that forms the basis of this book, the noticeable differentiator that your customers will talk about has to meet all four of the criteria in section 2 to be a talk trigger. It needs to also fit into at least one of the categories in this section, and it almost assuredly will.

Talkable Empathy

Empathy from business is in short supply. Shorter than ever perhaps, for two reasons. First, empathy requires inconsistency. It requires listening. It requires interacting with customers as a category of one. This approach, by definition, drives up the per-interaction cost of doing business. In their zeal for efficiency and profits, most businesses simply will not invest the time to deliver empathy. Second, the human-powered approach inherent in empathetic interaction mandates that employees be given permission to work outside scripted boundaries. Some companies believe that this opens them up to greater risk of crisis, or of legal action. In short, they are afraid to be empathetic.

Talkable Usefulness

Sometimes the best talk triggers just require you to have an exceptionally strong sense of what your customers and potential customers really want. Then you just give that to them in a way that’s remarkable, consistent, reasonable, and talkable.

As a talk trigger, usefulness can absolutely be an effective option. But it’s not the only choice. In fact, some businesses create consistent customer chatter by giving customers more than they expected. This is the generosity approach, and it’s one of the strongest of the five types of talk triggers.

Talkable Generosity

the omnipresence of shrinkflation is why talk triggers that do the opposite are so effective. This is the power of generosity.

Despite the variety of original champions for talk trigger ideas, the actual process of adoption is very similar in most organizations: It reflects a commitment to customers. Companies in this book did interviews. They tested ideas, looking for moments when they could make a customer smile. They looked for ideas that could become storytelling fodder. And in almost every case, they were fanatical about listening to customers.

six-step process for identifying, testing, and managing talk triggers.

The steps here are sequential and systematic, though how they manifest in differen...

To be effective with initiatives like talk triggers requires both great process and great mind-set. It is exceptionally rare for a great idea to be born and immediately thrive. Talk triggers behave a lot like products: They need constant evolution, optimization, refinement, and user feedback. Decent talk triggers can become outstanding talk triggers with minor changes. And, naturally, outstanding talk triggers can become irrelevant when market dynamics change. You need to be in the right mind-set to avoid frustration and help sustain momentum.

As Godin wrote in Purple Cow, “You do not equal the project. Criticism of the project is not criticism of you.”

6 STEPS TO CREATING TALK TRIGGERS

Who Knows What?

The first step toward creating effective word of mouth in your organization is to unlock everything already known about your customers—what they want and how they use the products and services offered by your business. It’s internal anthropology.

But one of the challenges of talk trigger creation—and in maintaining word-of-mouth programs through the years—is that it’s not really “owned” by a particular department. In reality, everybody owns word of mouth, because it takes all corners of the organization (whether the...

often doesn’t fit nicely into your organ...

There is no talk trigger without a great idea. But where do great ideas come from? Where is their nesting ground? Do they hide under bridges, like trolls? It’s possible that your great idea will magically appear during a sales call, in a customer support conversation, or even while listening to a Keith Urban record in the lunchroom.

“waiting for inspiration” is an unreliable method for creating a talk trigger.

What you need instead is an actual system and a team of skilled people who can delve into data, interpret it, and then draw outside the lines—a tea...

In any organization there are likely to be people with strong opinions about what the talk triggers should be. When strategizing about who should be involved in a talk trigger effort, think beyond job function and title. Who are your company’s most vocal employee advocates? Who was hire...

a talk trigger is: a strategic, operational differentiator that makes word of mouth involuntary.