Principle 1: Begin with the Consumer

The cases of electronic products like i-Pod, YouTube, and soft drinks like Red Bull, underline and highlight the First Principle of launching an effective WOM and Buzz campaign: Begin with the consumer. Provide a product or a service that fills genuine consumer needs and desires. Provide a product or a service that stirs up consumer emotions. Meet, engage, employ, and even partner with the consumer. Treat consumers as communities that surround your business rather than as individual units to be surrounded by your business. In a market system, the consumer is the center of the economic universe, the beginning and ending of every economic activity, the ultimate boss of every capitalist enterprise. This is especially the case in a digital global market system where consumer-controlled media allow each consumer to have more choices as to where, when, and for whom to buy products. For instance, search engines, like Google and MSN, allow consumers to find almost instantly who sells what and at what prices. Technology from TiVo allows consumers to choose what shows to see without commercial interruptions, turning “Prime Time” into “MyTime.” DVRs such as TiVo began to transform “Prime Time” into “MyTime.” Consumers have tapped into the time-shifting properties that allow appointment viewing to become truly on-demand viewing. Even valuable (meaning “targeted”) ads are now, in effect, irrelevant (because they’re never seen). Radio has seen the advent of satellite options (XM, Sirius) that offer consumers commercial-free experiences. Therefore, captive audience of drive time has been liberated.