5 Tips on "Listening to Customers"

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association recently interviewed Cymfony's Jim Nail for its "5 Tips" newsletter series and WOMBAT blog.  Jim's interview focused on listening to consumers.  It's a valuable and quick read so I've decided to post it on our site (and I suspect Andy and gang won't mind the word of mouth aspect of posting here).

Products that solve a consumer problem or meet a consumer need are going to be successful, but the only way to make those products is to talk to consumers. "Guessing or just meeting with R&D doesn't work," says Jim.  By listening to consumers, you get direct, unbiased results, unskewed by a moderator or a single strong personality in a focus group.

Here are Jim's five tips on listening to consumers:

Tip #1. Appoint a consumer ombudsman
The CEO and CFO protect the interests of the shareholders. The COO protects business processes and manufacturing, and HR officers protect the interests of employees. The CMO should represent consumers, but more often, marketing is an internal agency and not always very strategic.

Tip #2. Get a tool to listen to consumers
There are so many conversations in so many places on the internet that trying to compile it with tools like Technorati or Google can be extremely labor intensive. You may pull hundreds or thousands of conversations, and trying to read through them manually and distill them practically just won't happen.

Tip #3. Add human analysis
Once you have a tool in place to analyze the feedback, you still need the human touch from analysts and account managers who have the particular perspective your company needs, to extract the insights from consumers.

Tip #4. Listen ethically
Marketing with consumers rather than at them is new, and being able to change the traditional mentality of marketing is not easy. It is tempting to take shortcuts, such as posing as a consumer and posting favorable reviews of products.

Yes, there's huge pressure to make quarterly numbers, and WOM is not something you can pull off in a quarter. But if you take shortcuts, you'll do more harm than good.

Tip #5. Tie WOM to a financial metric that CEOs can love
Plenty of development work needs to be done on this topic in order to see exactly how WOM contributes to cash flow. But WOM marketers need to lift WOM beyond the "let's be nice to customers and they'll be nice to us" realm, bringing it to the level of strategy that can be placed side by side with other marketing investments that result in rational, quantitative, data-driven decisions.

Join the discussion at the WOMBAT blog