Leave it to a vaunted consultant to the world’s largest global organizations to take the simplest and most timeless of human communication concepts and make it sound deliciously, breathtakingly complicated–presumably for the analytical satisfaction of some corporate marketing department somewhere. However, buried within the research findings of the three M.B.A.s who wrote it, I found 22 words on the subject that are worthy of reflection and bear repeating–
“Marketers tend to build campaigns around emotional positioning, yet we found that consumers actually tend to talk—and generate buzz—about functional messages.” How about that. People choose to repeat memorable specifics, rather struggling to describe the staged emotional drama of the typical modern ad campaign, when it’s time to actually influence another person. A very useful tip and one of the most immutable rules of the Micro-Script. You’ll find the Word of Mouth McKinsey white paper at https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Marketing/Strategy/A_new_way_to_measure_word-of-mouth_marketing_2567?gp=1.