The Anatomy of Buzz (Abridged)

by Emanuel Rosen Narrated by Jason Culp

Overview

A groundbreaking guide to creating the word-of-mouth magic that cuts through the skepticism and information overload of today's consumers, and drives sales-and profits-to new heights.

What turns a "sleeper" into a box-office bonanza or catapults a just-released book to the top of bestseller lists? How do people decide which car to buy, which fashions fit the image they seek, and even which movie to see? Despite the daily assault of advertising and other traditional marketing strategies, statistics show that consumers are overwhelmingly persuaded by word of mouth-the recommendations of friends and the "buzz" that develops in the marketplace. As Newsweek recently proclaimed, "Buzz greases the great conveyor belt of culture and commerce, moving everything from movies to fashions of the body and mind faster and faster."

In The Anatomy of Buzz, former marketing VP Emanuel Rosen pinpoints the products and services that benefit the most from buzz-a universe that embraces everything from high-tech equipment to books, various consumer and entertainment products to legal and other support services-and offers specific strategies for creating and sustaining effective word-of-mouth campaigns. Drawing from interviews with more than 150 executives, marketing leaders, and researchers who have successfully built buzz for major brands, Rosen describes the ins and outs of attracting the attention of influential first users and "big-mouth" movers and shakers. He also discusses proven techniques for stimulating customer-to-customer selling-including how companies can spread the word to new territories by taking advantage of customer hubs and networks on the Internet and elsewhere.

Recent surveys show that 58 percent of young people rely to some extent on others when selecting a car, 53 percent of moviegoers follow the recommendations of friends, and 65 percent of the people who bought a Palm organizer were inspired by the enthusiasm of others. With The Anatomy of Buzz, business leaders have what they need to start the buzz and reignite excitement about a product or service stalled in a holding pattern, or launch a new product into the stratosphere.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172076824
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	11/15/2019
Edition description:	Abridged

Related Subjects

• Business
• Marketing & Sales
• Marketing
• Marketing - General & Miscellaneous

Read an Excerpt

1.

What Is Buzz?

I first witnessed how buzz travels years ago. In 1988 I was working at a typical start-up software company in California: five people, four Macs, one PC, and a lot of hope. We had a single product, EndNote, a reference tool for researchers, and it was still a few months away from release. We hadn't advertised it. In fact, only a handful of people in California knew it existed. Yet we had just received our first order in the mail--and that order came from Princeton, New Jersey. All five of us stood around that purchase order, staring at it and trying to figure out how someone a continent away had learned of us.

Several months earlier I had joined the company's founder, Rich Niles, to help him market the software. EndNote is designed to help researchers keep track of their references and compile bibliographies at the end of their research papers. Not a very sexy product, I admit, but a very useful tool when you need to organize your research and follow the nitty-gritty requirements of different journals. Rich came up with the idea after he saw how much time his wife, who's a scientist, was spending compiling bibliographies. Every academic journal has its own protocol for the way they want bibliographic information organized. One journal would want a reference to look like this:

Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations. 4th ed. New York: Free Press, 1995.

While another journal would want it to look this way:

Rogers, E. M. (1995). Diffusion of Innovations. (4th ed.). New York: Free Press.

Even with a word processor, you can imagine how tedious this task is when you have to go through and make these changes hundreds of times every year. EndNote stores references in a database format and can display them in any bibliographic style.

When the purchase order we got from New Jersey came in, we called the customer who had placed the order. How had he heard of EndNote? Apparently one of the few people who'd attended a sneak preview of our product in Berkeley, California, several days earlier had been so excited about EndNote that he posted an enthusiastic message on an electronic bulletin board used by academics. One of those academics had just become our first customer.

Before I joined that start-up, I was a copywriter in an advertising agency, and in my mind marketing worked like this: Companies advertise, customers see the clever advertisements that copywriters like me worked to create, and then--and only then--customers buy the products. But this obviously was not what was happening with that EndNote purchase order, and in the following nine years I was reminded thousands of times that in the real world things operate very differently. Since that first order more than two hundred thousand copies of EndNote have been sold, and most customers have told us that they heard about the product not from advertising, not from dealers, not from magazines--but rather from friends and colleagues.

That's how I became interested in buzz.

After this experience I started to pay more attention to word of mouth. But I was still not sure how important it was in other markets. Maybe, I thought, word of mouth played a significant role only in the academic market or only for software? Once I started researching the topic, however, it became clear that this is not the case. Buzz plays a major role in the purchasing process of many products:

Sixty-five percent of customers who bought a Palm organizer told the makers of this device that they had...

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