Coversational Capital: Lessons

As an Amazon Vine-Voice reviewer, I get an opportunity to review their products. Recently I read and reviewed Conversational Capital: How to Create Stuff People Love to Talk About. This was my first read on marketing and brand management. And it was certainly an interesting one too.

Key Take-Away: In order to be successful in today's competitive world, any product or service has to go beyond mere customer satisfaction. Designers, producers, manufactures have to keep the fact in mind that it is not the just the key attributes which matter, but rather it is the whole experience of using that product/service which matters to the customer. And it is this valuable experience which results in the best publicity for any product or service, i.e. the word-of-mouth publicity. It happens when your customers themselves become your brand ambassadors.

The experiential delightment which a customer gets from using your product or service. Authors have packed eight such "experience amplifiers" together and named them "Engines of Conversational Capital". These are more or less, the concepts which we already know, but packaged together and linked to each other. Citing examples from various brands and their marketing techniques, authors have done a good job in explaining their point.

1. Rituals
2. Exclusive Product Offering
3. Myths
4. Relevant Sensory Oddity (RSO)
5. Icons
6. Tribalism
7. Endorsement
8. Continuity

Examples of some successful brands through such word-of-mouth publicity: Apple iPhone, Cirque Du Soleil, IKEA, Hermon-Miller Aeron chair, Black AmEX card, Toyota Scion, Ben & Jerry, Nokia, and numerous others which are used in this book.

Overall, I would recommend reading this one to understand how the brands and their marketing folks try to entice us, the customers, towards their product.