Grapevine
Why Buzz Was a Fad but Word of Mouth Is Forever
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Word of mouth is an amazingly powerful force — but how does it really work?.
Businesses have become obsessed with stimulating word-of- mouth to counteract the declining effectiveness of advertising. But it’s easier said than done.
As the founder of BzzAgent, a community of more than 400,000 people who volunteer to talk to friends and acquaintances about products they genuinely love, Dave Balter is a successful practitioner, not a theorist. And he’s figured out how to measure and harness word-of-mouth without corrupting it.
In Grapevine, Balter shows why honest feedback – about books, restaurants, gadgets, or anything else – is more believable than any paid endorser. And he answers some of the most elusive questions in marketing, such as what makes word-of-mouth very different from “buzz” and “viral marketing.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like most other marketing books, this intriguing but unconvincing volume dwells on botched ad campaigns, implying that those campaigns would have triumphed if only the advertiser had sought the authors' advice. In this case, all the reviled efforts overlooked "the most powerful marketing force in the world": word-of-mouth. "Everybody talks to everybody else about products every day," writes Balter, founder of three-year-old Bzz
