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March 29, 2005
The word of mouth experience
Both Jackie and I are at the inaugural Word of Mouth Summit today and tomorrow in Chicago. The Summit is 350 marketers confabbing about all things word-of-mouth.
Dave Balter, founder and CEO of BzzAgent, served up a few tasty morsels during his presentation:
* 80% of the word-of-mouth conversations that happen among BzzAgent's agents are face-to-face
* 50% of negative word of mouth is the result of "injustice" experienced by customers
* 22% of all conversations include some form of word of mouth
* Sales of the Pontiac G6, the car that received oodles of buzz when Oprah gave away 276 of them to her audience one day, are down 30%*
* UPDATE: Michael Wiley of GM, who was at the WOMMA Summit, disputes this contention in the comments section for this post.
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Enjoy the show. It was a tough call -- WOM Chicago, or Freedom to Connect -- http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/cat_recon_f2c_2005.html -- in DC?
I just returned from the Summit. I'm sorry I missed Dave Balter's presentation. Your last bullet point, regarding the Pontiac G6 is not accurate. Is this something Dave quoted?
Please read the article you are linking to (which itself has some inaccuracies). It says the plant is running at 30% below capacity, not that sales are down 30%.
btw, I really liked your book.
michael
Michael -- Thanks for commenting and the kudos!
Yup, Dave Balter mentioned the G6/Oprah giveaway and what he saw as a sales decline in his presentation.
As for the Free Press story, it's worth clarifying that it quotes an auto industry analyst who "believes sales are 'at least 30 percent below' where they need to be to keep the G6 factories running at capacity."
If, as the analyst suggests, that sales are below 30 percent to keep factories at capacity, what is the translation?
Also, is there a G6 evangelist group?
I'm puzzled as to how an analyst's conjecture that a plant is running 30% below capacity gets translated as "sales are down 30%."
Secondly, the product is 1/4 launched. What that means is that the G6 is a product family and there are six additional models/configurations coming out, four this year alone.
There are coupes, convertibles and different engine configurations. Sales have increased nearly every month for this vehicle. Go see for yourself at an industry website or check out the sales figures at http://media.gm.com.
Sorry to quibble over this but I wanted to set the record straight.
Michael
Michael -- thanks for the update. If I might quibble back a bit, all in the spirit of good discussion for people who care about this stuff, which I certainly do :)
* Press release URLs on the GM media site are hidden by a browser frame, (although they are displayed in the search results). This makes a citizen marketer's job harder for pointing toward specific URLs from browsers.
* Chances are the the GM search engine isn't part of your responsibility, but its functionality is circa 1998. The search results are very un-Google like, which made it pretty hard to find sales figures. After 20 minutes, I found a February 2005 release which said, G6 "deliveries up 72 percent compared to January."
* A final observation about perhaps why the G6 is something of a target: Its debut on the Oprah show was so audacious, so over-the-top and, IMHO, so not in the spirit of "Oprah's favorite things" that it is certain to suffer the arrows of attention.
Ben,
Yeah, we are aware of the shortcomings you mentioned. And, we are in the midst of a major upgrade for the media site. I guess it would have helped if I would have given you the exact URL to a monthly sales release ;)
Enough on the G6 for now...
Heath, great work on blogging the Freedom to Connect conference. Lots of inspiring work you documented in your blog posts.
