Word of mouth remains one of the top ways that people hear about a business, and that’s unlikely to change. However, word of mouth is only valuable if people understand what they’re sharing.

In the book “Contagious“, they share this idea:

When trying to generate word of mouth, many people forget one important detail. They focus so much on getting people to talk that they ignore the part that really matters: what people are talking about.

They take it further, sharing a story from the 2004 Olympics where there was a marketing stunt that got a lot of attention, but not for the company that was being promoted:

Marketing experts talk about “the fool in the pool” as one of the worst guerrilla marketing failures of all time. Usually they deride it for having disrupted the competition and ruining the moment for athletes who had trained all their lives. They also point out that it led to Ron Bensimhon being arrested and fined. These are all good reasons to consider Bensimhon’s belly flop, well, a flop. But I’d like to add another one to the list. The stunt had nothing to do with the product it was trying to promote.

This happens a lot with content online. A company will come up with a super creative video, and it might go viral, but people don’t understand how the video related to the product. A great example was Evian’s “Roller Babies” commercial; it was super popular, but had no effect on the company’s revenue. In fact, despite being among the top ads of all time, their sales dropped 25 percent that year.

Creative ideas can be awesome, but creative ideas that actually tie into what you do are worth far more.

I’ve heard this story a few times and I thought it was worth sharing.

Back in the 1700’s, leadership in Paris was trying to get people to be willing to eat more potatoes. Among other challenges, potatoes had once been thought to cause leprosy, so people weren’t wanting to eat them. Antoine-Augustin Parmentier had a tried a number of different techniques to raise their status, including giving bouquets of potato blossoms to the king and queen, but it was the “guards” that did the trick.

During the day, he’d have guards stand watch over the potato fields to make them seem more important. However, he’d withdraw the guards at night and people would sneak in to “steal” some potatoes for themselves. The potatoes seemed much more valuable, and it worked amazingly well.

Sauerkraut

A similar thing happened with Captain James Cook and his efforts to prevent scurvy on his ships. It was discovered that eating sauerkraut would help prevent scurvy (thanks to the vitamin C in it), but he was having trouble getting the men to eat it. Here’s the quick version of the story, as told by 42courses:

So how did he get his cantankerous crew to eat sauerkraut?

Well…for a while he served it only to his officers whilst making sure that they ate it in front of the crew. It wasn’t long before envy set in.

Then, one day, he said “Well, I suppose the men can have it one day a week.”

In one stroke, he had his whole crew eating the stuff, saving many lives and ensuring the success of his many overseas voyages.

Influencers

We see the same kind of thing today with influencers. While we like to think that logic and clear heads will make the right choices, it’s certainly not always true. Having others lead the way can make things more appealing. It’s long been said that consumers purchase products based on emotion and later use facts to try to justify the purchase, and these stories show that this kind of behavior has been happening for hundreds of years.