2008-05-18 — You don’t need to spend a lot of marketing dollars to create a sensation among consumers.
Heinz ketchup, Blendtec blenders and Makers Mark whiskey are all examples of brands that have used successful word-of-mouth marketing with minimal investment.
With email, blogs, YouTube and a plethora of other consumer-driven content exploding on the Internet, savvy restaurateurs can no longer afford to ignore the power of their customers’ opinions, says Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking.
“The days are gone where you can write a gazillion ads to convince people to buy your stuff, even if it isn’t very good,” says Sernovitz, who delivered a speech on the topic of viral marketing Saturday morning to a packed room of several hundred attendees at the NRA Show in Chicago.
“What’s the first thing people do before they buy?” he asks. “They Google.” Some 60,000 regular folks penned Internet reviews on products or services this year alone, notes Sernovitz, all the more reason that restaurant owners should replace their traditional matchbook give-aways with in-store invitations for customers to post their own restaurant reviews on Yelp or some other popular restaurant review site.
http://www.qsrmagazine.com/articles/news/story.phtml?id=6575
