Frontiering Talk

Here’s a great story from CMO magazine, about a company “Bike Friday” who has a great fold away bike, which certainly generates a lot of discussion. To capture this discussion and use it to expand it’s business they have set up a refereal program.

Margaret Day who is 70-something and lives in my home country of Australia has referred over $300K of sales .. and in return has earned credits to buy herself a new $2000 bike.

The company also uses a referral awards program. Customers receive a set of 12 prepaid postage cards with their name and that of the Bike Friday expert who sold them their bike. Whenever a customer meets someone whose interest is piqued by his bike, he’ll fill out a card and drop it in the mail. Bike Friday then mails information to the contact. It also captures this interaction in its database so that riders who make a referral receive a bonus if their prospect purchases a bike. Customers can choose either a $50 check or $75 credit toward future products. Day accumulated enough referral credits to purchase a $2,000 bike last year.

The referral program has helped the company acquire more than a third of its 10,000 customers; it also helps drive sales. Over the last three and a half years, the program has generated $1.3 million in sales. In 2004, 29 percent of its sales came from referrals.

“We did a lot more press releases and advertisements early on, but we realized our customers were our best advertisers—if we made them happy,” explains Hanna Scholz, Bike Friday’s marketing manager.

Consumers love to talk about products that they are passionate about. But providing them with the right tools and incentives is what word of mouth marketing is all about.

Tags: WOM

Here’s a great story about a band who was practicing some dance steps in the backyard for a Video they were making for a song. Now you can’t watch yourself backwards, so they mounted a camera to film themselves so they could make sure they had it right.

One of their girlfriends thought the video was so great and she begged them to release it as their official video instead of the “real” professional video that they had been practicing for. The band laughed at her. Not to be deterred, she posted the video online and emailed a couple of friends to get a second opinion.

Two point five million downloads later …. Full story here thanks to Marketingsherpa. The video clip is here.

I think the message here is that people want to see real people saying real things, telling stories, or dancing or singing. And you know what? consumers want to see the real product and interact with stories about real people using the product in real life … Hopefully advertising is starting to understand this.

Shankar Gupta over at Mediapost, writes this article about Microsofts plans to use it’s AdCenter to support it’s online office suite.

Industry expert Jim Spaeth, a partner at Sequent Partners, said Microsoft’s move shows that the company intends to monetize users’ desktops. “Just as television has been the dominant, ‘must have’ medium for reaching consumers in the home and radio the equivalent for the car, the computer is the key channel in the workplace,” he said. “Microsoft’s recent announcement signals their intent to monetize the media potential of this channel which they alone dominate.”

Microsoft already has it’s Live.com site in Beta which perhaps describes a look/feel of what might be coming for an online office suite.

The key challenge for these initiatives is to provide relevance in the ads. I don’t want my Office Paperclip to start selling me a new line of toothpaste!