What’s Important in Marketing Communications
Larry J. Rosenberg, Ph.D., Principal
Communication Miracles Consulting, LLC
larryros@gmail.com

Word of Mouth (WOM)

• What we do to communicate to the market is called promotion – advertising, public relations, brochures, posters, and cards; it can be very useful with getting and retaining members.
• But even more effective is what the people in the market communicate to each other – that is Word of Mouth (WOM) – it is fast and more believable that any of our promotional tools.
• When WOM is positive, we get more new members and our current members buy more services and upgrades; when WOM is negative, we get fewer new members, fewer service sales, and lose some current members.

Viral Marketing (VM)

• When WOM travels by emails, that is viral marketing (VM)– like a fast-spreading virus among a population.
• We need to do things in our promotion activities to encourage our members to send out emails, which then leads to other waves of emails.

User Created Content (UCC)

• User created content (UCC) is when members come up with the content – words, pictures and/or videos – that they share with each other through WOM and VM.
• UCC – especially testimonials and other comments on their life experience – give us more content to use in our promotion and to attract people to our websites.

Customer Satisfaction (CS)

• The level of customer satisfaction (CS) largely determines whether members stay with us and how many more services and upgrades they purchase.
• CS means that our performance (services, products, relationships, facilities and prices) meets or exceeds their expectations.
• We have to know their expectations (wants, needs and culture) in order to know if they value our performance.

Effective Communication

Be in their world – choose to let go of your ego and be of service to them (WIIFT).

WIIFT = what’s in it for them. You can only answer WIIFT when you let go of the need to speak your point of view, and instead focus on listening to them and new possibilities.

Create the listening – state your wider context or listen for their deeper commitment.

• I-based sharing – I feel X way or I heard you say X, rather than you did X.
• Re-Create – Confirm and clarify (is that accurate, or please say more about it).
• Co-create – what shall we do – or – how can we combine your idea of X with my idea
  of Y?

Feedback – ask for and listen to it to improve your communication results; discover your communication blind-spot through feedback!