Highly Recommended: Harnessing the Power of Word of Mouth and Social Media to Build Your Brand and Your Business

By Paul M. Rand

Reach more customers and grow your business with today’s most powerful marketing tool: Word-of-Mouth

Highly Recommended shows the impact of customer recommendations on businesses--transforming how people buy, how you reach customers, how you improve products, and ultimately how you can grow your company by leveraging the power of recommendations. It explains why word-of-mouth recommendations are marketing’s “holy grail,” how to get people talking, who gives recommendations, where recommendations occur, what it takes to build a recommendable brand, and how to instill WOM into every aspect of a business and at the center of any marketing mix.

Paul M. Rand is the founder, President and CEO of Zócalo Group, one of the world’s leading word of mouth and social media marketing agencies and one of the fastest growing companies inside Omnicom Group, the 2nd largest global advertising and marketing holding company. He also serves at the Chief Digital Officer for Ketchum, a leading global communications firm.

• Language: English
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Release date: Oct 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9780071816229

Book preview

life.

PART 1

Word of Mouth Recommendations: Marketing’s Holy Grail

CHAPTER 1

Stew Leonard’s and the 30-Minute Recommendation

In October 2012, after weeks of careful planning, a couple colleagues and I made our way from Chicago to Stamford, Connecticut, for a series of meetings with the brand leaders at Philips Consumer Products Group.

We’d been working with Philips Norelco, and the director of brand communications, Shannon Jenest, wanted to introduce us to the other brands so they could consider word of mouth and social media marketing in their programs for the new year.

We had a busy two days’ worth of sessions scheduled with all of the consumer lifestyle brands under the Philips umbrella—Avent (baby products), Sonicare and Zoom (oral healthcare), Philips Norelco (men’s grooming), and Saeco (espresso machines).

Our first day of back-to-back sessions had gone very well. To celebrate our collective success, a group of us headed out to dinner. My team had booked a table at a local steak house, our default celebratory setting of choice, but our clients strongly recommended their favorite Italian restaurant. (You can guess where we ended up . . .)

After enjoying drinks and appetizers and, naturally, rehashing the day’s conversations, we got around to talking about everyone’s upcoming weekend plans.

One of our clients mentioned that she was taking her son to someplace called Stew Leonard’s to buy his pumpkin and pick up a few Halloween decorations.

Never heard of Stew Leonard’s, I said, not suspecting I was about to be schooled, big time, in the art of recommendations. What is it—an apple orchard or something?

Both clients looked at me incredulously.

Stew Leonard’s is the most amazing, fun, delicious, and incredible grocery store in the whole world, one of them said to me, with the other nodding and smiling, eager to weigh in.

So, for the next 30 minutes (not an exaggeration), my two clients shared every detail of this dairy wonderland—each trying to outdo the other about who loved Stew Leonard’s more.

The Disneyland of Dairy

Now, for the uninformed, like me, Stew Leonard’s is a chain of four supermarkets—though that hardly begins to describe the full extent of their awesomeness—in Connecticut and New York. I have to admit that once I began researching the company, I felt a little neglectful for never having heard of it before.

Not only has Ripley’s Believe It or Not! deemed the chain the World’s Largest Dairy but none other than Fortune magazine lists Stew Leonard’s as one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For.

The more I learned, the clearer it became that Stew Leonard’s had purposefully integrated ways to be recommended into every aspect of its business: design, product selection, marketing, PR, customer service, advertising, product innovation, promotions, and human resources. In short, it had become what we all must become in this new Digital Age: a social business, integrating customer and employee feedback at the speed of sound and using it to craft our future. As a result, and as I’d just witnessed firsthand, the company came highly recommended.

This place has no right to be called a supermarket chain. (In fact, the New York Times called it "the Disneyland of Dairy