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Everyone Is in Marketing These Days
September 4, 2008

Here is a link to an interesting story from Ad Age that came to me yesterday via my daily Interactive Advertising Bureau e-newsletter. It caught my eye because I buy shoes via Zappos.com, and I am very happy with them. And the fact that I just made it a point to say that in some way illustrates one subtle means of word-of-mouth marketing—which is the subject of the article. But not in the way you think. In this case, Zappos relies in no small part on its own employees to spread the good word about the company:

Every year Zappos.com, one of the fastest-growing e-commerce sites, publishes a "culture book." Three hundred pages in length, the book includes written -- and often gushy -- testimonials from employees about what it means to work at Zappos.com.

"Our Zappos culture is truly the best work experience I have ever encountered," writes Chris V. "As a new employee of the company, I was blown away by how amazing the company really was. When I started I felt so unreal," notes David J. And on and on and on -- you get the idea.

Not by accident
If you talk to Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh or his marketing chief Brian Kalma,* you'll find a plan and a strategy, not to mention powerful, validating numbers to boot behind all this group love. Indeed, the vast majority of trial and repeat at Zappos.com is driven by word of mouth, and employees -- their motivation, their attentiveness to customers, their handling of feedback -- are foundational to that approach.

Mr. Kalma, director of creative services and brand marketing, employs the term "people planning," arguing that each employee needs to be a great point of contact with customers. "We invest the time and money into hiring and nurturing the right people, as many other companies do in their media planning," he said.

Wow. Think about that for a moment. Think about the company you work for: would you go out of your way to say nice things about it to customers—or even non-customers? Would you be willing to be a de facto ad rep for your company? Or, to look at it another way, would you believe that your employees would (c’mon, be honest!)? If so, great. But if not, why not?

Over the course of my nearly 20-year career, I have worked for large companies that treated its employees like joyless proles or implemented trendy management strategies of dubious logic—and we b***ched about them appropriately. But I have also worked for mid-sized and small companies that were entrepreneurial in spirit, with smart managers and ownerrs who motivated myself and other employees to do our best work and talk up the company and its products, which we happily did.

Workplace morale may seem incongruous when talking about marketing, but it really isn’t. We have all dealt with apathetic employees of companies we have tried to do business with, and they reflect unfavorably on the company as a whole (I’m thinking of one or two airlines here...), which in turn suggests that there is something toxic at the root of the matter. Sure, while there are unhappy people in even the most pleasant work environments, oftentimes they are merely the reflection of deeper issues.

As the article asks, is it reasonable to expect a company’s employees to be its unofficial sales force? As the phenomenon of viral video has shown us, people who are happy about something will gladly tell others about it. And, of course, people who are unhappy about something will probably tell even more. (The author of the above article has a book coming out with the best title ever: Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000. Indeed.

I am hardly an expert on workplace morale, especially given that I now work isolated in a concrete bunker several miles below the Earth’s surface and have only the barest minimum of contact with the human race, and even then only via an android replica of myself I have programmed to go out and run errands. But I recently came across a story about Gordon Bethune, who some years back helped resurrect Continental Airlines. When someone complained about someone in a different department getting a bonus, Bethune took out his watch and said, “Tell me how this watch will work if I take out one of the pieces.”

Everyone has a role to play in the success of a company, from the highest-paid executive to the data entry clerk to the receptionist, and everyone has a stake in the success of that company. And everyone is potentially involved in their company’s marketing efforts—even if they may not realize it. 

Posted by Richard Romano on September 4, 2008 | Comments (0)