Motivating Positive Word of Mouth

by Aaron ShieldsFeb 25, 2010

Motivating customers to talk about your brand isn’t about providing incentives. Incentives only drive short-term talk, and talk fades away after the incentives disappear.

Driving long-term, positive talk requires innovating around what customers love about your brand and exceeding their expectations.

Exceeding expectations and taking into account customer needs is why the original Apple iPhone dominated post-release buzz when compared the the release of the recent Palm Pre.

Apple knows that a central component to what its customers love about the Apple brand is an easy user experience. Despite levels of hype leading to the iPhone being dubbed the Jesus phone, the iPhone exceeded everyone’s expectations on its ease of use, leading to a plethora of blog posts proclaiming its virtues and even YouTube videos of toddlers working the intuitive user interface.

In contrast, the Palm Pre was positioned so that at best its interface could match the ease of the iPhone, but not exceed it by noticeable degrees. Even if the Pre matched the iPhone, meeting expectations is not enough to generate a viral spread of positive word of mouth.

Palm would have been wise to head the advice that helped Ed Colligan, Donna Dubinsky, and Jeff Hawkins to turn Palm into the giant it once was: Underpromise and overdeliver.

For more on generating positive word of mouth, check out my deck The New World of Word of Mouth over at SlideShare.

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