Alekhya Chakrabarty, IMT Ghaziabad

The presentation was going perfectly according to plan-till I passed the baton to Ankit. Always a passionate speaker-cum-marketer, he launched into the barrage of ways he was going to make sure the marketing blitz was going to work for our team. Midway through the presentation, and I quote him, Ankit says: “Through mouth-to-mouth publicity we will ensure that all customers are informed of the delights our brand has to offer”. The class roared in agreement, the faculty was pissed beyond imagination (our grades proved the degree of her annoyance, who cares about grades anyway)-but it made my decision amply clear indeed–the confusing world of mouth to mouth, err..’word of mouth’ needed to be delved deeper into.

Word of mouth can have many a definition, but the most effective explanation in my book is given by Peter Senge in his pioneering work ‘The Fifth Discipline’. Here is how he explains word of mouth as an example of a reinforcing circle:

Reinforcing Sales Process Caused by Customers Talking to Each
Other About Your Product
This diagram shows a reinforcing feedback process wherein
actions snowball. Again, you can follow the process by walking
yourself around the circle:
If the product is a good product, more sales means more satisfied
customers, which means more positive word of mouth. That will lead to
still more sales, which means even more widespread word of mouth . . . and
so on. On the other hand, if the product is defective, the virtuous cycle
becomes a vicious cycle: sales lead to less satisfied customers, less positive
word of mouth, and less sales; which leads to still less positive word of
mouth and less sales.

Looking back, the Neanderthal man used word of mouth in his community to pass on the tool making skills and techniques to his successors. From those days to the age of Twitter, Facebook-word of mouth is surely here to stay. Especially in these days-it has become such an inseparable part of our life that even in our subconscious minds we become prey to the guile of word of mouth. Whether it is about trashing the latest Bollywood release, spotting the latest hottie on campus, identifying the latest fad in the world of fashion, locating the most happening hangout in town-we spread word of mouth knowingly or unknowingly.

That’s about the almost ubiquitous prevalence of word of mouth, but a little reflection on the term and its related aspects will make one realise some of the less obvious connotations.

1. 
   It is so insanely impossible to ignore. It chases you down like a cruiser missile-you feel left out of the social circles if you do not pass it onto the next person who is virgin of the content of the latest word of mouth.
2. 
   It spreads faster than the best quality swine flu virus, or the most vicious worm on the internet. Ask Shashi ‘I won’t twit again’ Tharoor to certify.
3. 
   It seduces as dangerously as good old gossip-one feels like his innards are going to burst if he doesn’t participate in the word of mouth campaign J
4. 
   The term itself is insanely infuriating. Word of Mouth-as if the words could emerge from any other orifice of the human body.

In the world of social media marketing, brands, especially new brands, can ignore word of mouth at their own peril. Popular Websites like http://www.mouthshut.com/ thrive entirely on the power of word of mouth. Word of mouth has resulted in deaths of many a product which have been ahead of their times.

To wrap it up, at the end of the momentous two years of one’s life spent in the hallowed halls of the B School, when one wears the graduation robe with his stomach full of the MBA lingo – the candidate who takes the crown for being the most vicious and omnipresent one is, you guessed it-word of mouth