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Conversational Capital: How to Create Stuff People Love to Talk About |  |
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Conversational Capital: How to Create Stuff People Love to Talk About | |
Bertrand Cesvet is chairman and chief strategist of SID LEE, a Commercial Creativity company with offices in Montreal and Amsterdam. He provides creative and strategic leadership on marketing communications and experience design projects for clients such as adidas, Red Bull, Cirque du Soleil, and MGM Mirage. He lives in Montreal with his wife Josee and daughters Gabrielle and Emma.
Tony Babinski is a Montreal-based writer, creative director, and filmmaker. He has worked with SID LEE since 2000 and is the author of Cirque du Soleil :20 Years Under the Sun, the authorized history of Cirque du Soleil. He lives in Montreal with his wife Julie and children Sophie, Max, and Lily.
Eric Alper is a strategist for SID LEE. He has kept a blog about Conversational Capital going since 2006. He has also developed and written the Conversational Capital blog.
An Exclusive Conversation on Conversational Capital with Author Bertrand Cesvet
What is the most common mistake made by individuals seeking to harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing?
All too many individuals seeking to harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing focus on the vehicles through which word-of-mouth is perpetuated, rather than the triggers of word-of-mouth to begin with.
The number of times we've heard marketers yearn for a presence on social media or a user-generated content campaign is nauseating. Our response is pretty universal ~~ it doesn't matter that you give your consumers a place to talk if they don't have anything good to talk about.
Thus, our central message is to focus not on the tools, but on the substance of conversations. The only way to create resonant and sustained word-of-mouth is to focus on the inherent value of the experience itself.
I found it interesting that Conversational Capital should not be termed "buzz." Why is this so important?
Buzz is something created around an experience rather than related to the experience itself. Let's say I put a pedometer in a box of Fruit Loops cereal and proceed to call it "healthy" because the pedometer encourages one to exercise. I've done nothing to change the experience or the nutritional value of the cereal itself - only created a stunt to project a temporal aura of "health."
Do smaller companies have an advantage in building Conversational Capital?
Being small isn't necessary, but it helps. Why? Because engineering and implementing Conversational Capital requires three things: 1) the ability to be nimble, 2) the capacity to be entrepreneurial (and thus embrace some degree of risk-taking) AND 3) the foresight to take a long-term view of the development of your brand, unconstrained by investors clambering for short-term profit-taking.
That being said, many large organizations have successfully preserved these three competences. Look at an organization like Southwest Airlines - the largest domestic air carrier in the US. The firm has managed to develop Conversational Capital principally because its empowered culture is by its very nature, entrepreneurial.
So in essence, the ability to act small is what matters more than being small.
How wary should marketers be with the double-edged sword of myth?
Myth must be rooted in some fundamental truth about the brand, the brand experience, or the brand's founding. Otherwise myth lives in the realm of lies, rather than as a story that's told and retold. Marketers can temper their wariness by ensuring that the myth(s) around their brand are continuous ~~ it is continuity that keeps the cutting edge of that proverbial sword away from you.
What industries do you feel are under-utilizing Conversational Capital?
Industries that view their customers with disdain or an attitude of dismissiveness.
Look at the North American Air Transport sector. Airlines continue to pare service in a continuous quest for cost-cutting, thereby commoditizing themselves rather than developing the ability to build brands and extract premiums.
Look too to the North American Auto Industry. It is in crisis principally because it didn't listen to the talk around its brands. And it didn't build products worthy of conversation.
Many further examples exist, from education, to financial services, to telecom, to department stores. But ultimately, the realization must be apparent that not everyone can be a Conversational Capital king. But each industry should have its star(s).
~“In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell presents an important idea without any ‘how to.’ Now Bertrand Cesvet provides the ‘how to’ you need to create ‘Tipping Points’ for your business and success. This book is a compelling presentation of a powerful idea. This is how the new world will do business. Highly recommended if you care about your future.”
Stewart Emery, coauthor of international best-seller Success Built to Last
“Ultimately, magic is unexplainable. Still, Conversational Capital provides the most insightful analysis of what makes our shows ring in the heart of fans.”
Guy Laliberte, founder, Cirque du Soleil
“Like all great ideas, Conversational Capital is at its core simple: word-of-mouth momentum can be created, harnessed, and used to build consumer passion for a brand better and more cost-effectively than almost any other marketing medium.”
Rupert Duchesne,CEO of Aeroplan
“Marketing is an art that Conversational Capital turns smartly into science. This book provides the complete prescription for getting consumers excited about your ideas.”
Jim Champy, coauthor, Reenginering the Corporation, and author, Outsmart!
Embed into Your Products and Experiences the Ingredients that Drive Advocacy:
Create products and services that consumers find truly significant Intensify consumption experiences to transform your brands into market leaders Don’t settle for serendipity: manage and control the word-of-mouth around your brand by manipulating eight powerful experience amplifiersFor all the books that speak of the value of consumer advocacy, few indicate how to create it to begin with. Armed with a compelling set of examples from their own work in fostering leading brands, the authors reveal the triggers of word-of-mouth and a process to embedding them in your own products, helping you create stuff people love to talk about. From Bertrand Cesvet, chairman of Sid Lee, a leading purveyor of experiential design and communications services that leverages commercial creativity for breakthrough brands including Cirque du Soleil, adidas, and Red Bull.
1% of the proceeds from the royalties earned by the authors will be donated to the One Drop Foundation. The mission of the One DropTM Foundation is to fight poverty around the world by giving everyone access to safe water.
About the Authors x
How This Book Came Together xi
This Is an Open Source Book xiii
Foreword by Hermann Deininger xv
Introduction xvii
PART 1: Defining Conversational Capital
1 What Is Conversational Capital? 3
2 The Eight Engines of Conversational Capital 9
3 How Conversational Capital Works 15
4 Why Conversational Capital Works 35
5 Conversational Capital Is Not Buzz 45
6 Conversational Capital and Advocacy 53
7 Conversational Capital Is for Everyone 55
PART 2: The Engines of Conversational Capital
8 Rituals 63
9 Initiation 69
10 Exclusive Product Offering (EPO) 77
11 Over-Delivery 85
12 Myths 91
13 Relevant Sensory Oddity (RSO) 99
14 Icons 107
15 Tribalism 115
16 Endorsement 123
17 Continuity 127
PART 3: Implementing Conversational Capital
18 Getting Started 135
19 Designing a Solution 143
20 Implementation 153
21 And Two More Questions 161
Glossary of Terms 165
Index 171
This is a book about why certain brands outperform the competition. Through close observation, we've determined how market leaders inject intensity into their products and services and turn them into experiences that truly matter to consumers. This is the "stuff " we refer to on the cover of this book. These highly charged experiences provide incendiary fuel for conversations that consumers engage in to define who they are. Because they have so much identity defining and affirming significance, having the power to shape such experiences is the new Holy Grail for businesses bent on leadership. And, like the Holy Grail, it is ultimately mysterious and elusive.
Or is it? We've written this book because we believe that creating such experiences is a process you can influence. It's not as mysterious as you may think. It is something you can manage through observation, insight, and, most importantly, creativity.
Our belief isn't just a matter of opinion. It's rooted in our direct experience with one of the biggest conversation-generating successes of the last quarter century: Cirque du Soleil.
In 2001, Cirque du Soleil asked us to redesign its website. The company was already an international live entertainment giant. With eight ground-breaking shows running in various traveling and permanent installations around the world, Cirque had achieved gross annual revenues of over 500 million dollars a year and counting. At the time, before user-generated content began maximizing the Internet's potential to create thriving online communities, Cirque already had a fan club boasting 300,000 dedicated members.
We soon became Cirque's main marketing communications agency and have been with the company ever since. Cirque du Soleil now has fi ve permanent shows in Las Vegas, one in Orlando, one in Macao, and nine shows on tour. Th ey have expanded into television, film, music, and, more recently, lifestyle products and experiences. Their business keeps growing— and perhaps the most amazing thing about the company's remarkable evolution into a cultural icon is that it took place with almost no mass marketing to support it.
Before we began working on the new site, we had to come to terms with just how much the Cirque du Soleil brand meant to its fans. Almost everyone who had ever seen a Cirque show liked it. Many of them loved it and became repeat fans. Perhaps more importantly, a significant number of Cirque fans described the shows as life-changing experiences and became brand ambassadors, carrying the Cirque torch with them wherever they went.
All of this happened without even a nod of recognition to how things are supposed to work in conventional marketing practice. For decades, the accepted wisdom in industry circles has been that brands succeed only if a ton of money is thrown in the direction of mass marketing. Want to be noticed? Spend big on media. Make sure that television and print ads with a simple, easy-to-understand message about your brand get out there in front of as many people as possible, over and over and over again. Combining maximum reach with maximum frequency is the only way to go.
Except that didn't happen with Cirque du Soleil. Instead, the company's success grew organically, through word-of-mouth. Cirque is a success because people have taken it to heart, and made it part of their own personal narratives—something they not only talk about with others, but that also defi nes who they are.
Nothing is more powerful than when consumers make your story part of their story. This is especially true today, in a fragmented media market that's spilling over with branded communication efforts. Obviously, mass-market communications can be meaningful and memorable, but it's getting harder than ever to break through the clutter. Even if a breakthrough happens, consumers who've grown up in the media age view "top-down" communication with suspicion and skepticism. When a message does succeed in getting across, it carries little weight.
Highly charged consumer advocacy through word-ofmouth communication represents the exact opposite. Unlike mass marketing, it's carried "horizontally" from peer to peer, so it has more power and authority. Consumers who believe in certain brand experiences and are vocal about their belief are the carriers. Like a virus, it spreads on contact fast.
Over the last several years, we've observed that, like Cirque du Soleil, the best products and experiences owe their success to word-of-mouth communication.
Data from a recent study by The London School of Economics titled "Advocacy Drives Growth" makes this clear. Th e study was conducted in the U.K., but its findings have universal implications. It found that positive word-of-mouth predicted sales growth for retail banks, car manufacturers, mobile phone networks, and supermarkets. It also revealed that companies with higher levels of word-of-mouth advocacy grew faster than their competitors and generated greater sales.1
Word-of-mouth is valuable currency. Like any currency, we believe that its value can be managed. Build it properly and you have an asset that increases the value of your brand. Ignore it or spend it unwisely and you have a liability—even if you've invested millions above the line.
Because word-of-mouth advocacy is organic and democratic and because consumers control so much of its power, it can appear scary and unpredictable to marketers. It shouldn't be. What we've seen, time and again, is that positive word-of-mouth happens when a certain number of key factors are present in a brand story. We call these factors the engines of Conversational Capital. By becoming aware of and managing these engines properly, you can turn Conversational Capital into a toolbox that builds value into your product or service.
People are talking. We're writing this because we want you and your brand to be part of the conversation.
WE'RE COMMITTING SUICIDE HERE - We're advertising people, yet, in stumbling upon Conversational Capital, we have unearthed a truth about the branding process that boots the cornerstone of our business right out from under us. Th e discomfi ting thing about Conversational Capital is this: When word-ofmouth works well, traditional advertising and design become much less important. When the engines of Conversational Capital are built into your consumption experience, positive word-of-mouth is likely to follow. So we're stuck with a quandary: Do we spill the beans or shut our mouths and keep billing for the same old same old?
Too bad—Mom always told us to share.
NO, NEVER MIND: WE'RE TOO LAZY! - On second thought, self-immolation requires too much energy. The truth is, advertising people are lazy by nature (otherwise, we'd be novelists, nuclear physicists, or whatever). The second truth about Conversational Capital is that it makes our jobs easier because it turns consumer experiences into tight, compelling stories. And the better the story, the simpler it is to write a great brief, come up with a killer strategy, and produce award-winning creative.
So let's work on that story together. It may be against our essential nature, but we'll do the heavy lifting (promise).
SUMMING UPEXCUSE ME, BUT YOU'RE CALLING A LITTLE LATE - We consider ourselves storytellers by trade. We take your consumer experience and distill it into a narrative that's relevant to your target market. Most of the time, however, clients call us too late. By the time they do, they come to us with products and experiences that are already designed and with fully developed stories. And those stories...well, sometimes they're not as compelling as they could be. It's the curse of our business. Conversational Capital enables us to rework with you the narrative that informs your consumer experience, and it helps make that story one that people want to tell.
So, we don't have to spend a lot of time turning the sow's ears into silk purses.
When products and services become intense experiences, something powerful happens. They become fuel for conversations that consumers engage in to define who they are.
That process turns brands into market leaders. More importantly, what we've observed about market leaders like Cirque du Soleil and others tells why and how it happens.
Turning that process into something you can manage and control is what this book is about.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSIONIs this just another book about word-of-mouth?
We don't think so. Although this book acknowledges the fundamental importance of word-of-mouth in today's economy, it goes further than anything we've read in describing why and how word-of-mouth happens in the first place.
We think most people will agree, but this book is not intended as a closed discussion. We know there are intelligent and perceptive doubters and nay-sayers out there, and we welcome their points of view. Conversation about Conversational Capital can and will extend outside of this book!
Find out what other people are saying and tell us what you think at www.conversationalcapital.com.
FOOTNOTE1 Marsden , P., Samson, A., and Upton , N. "Advocacy Drives Growth." Brand Strategy. Nov/Dec 2005.
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