Principle 5: Find the Right Context

The success of My Greek Fat Wedding and the relative failure of Brides underline the Fifth Principle of an effective WOM and buzz campaign: Find the right social context, the right place that nurtures innovators and early adopters and the right time, to let these groups spread the message. Adjust your message to reflect changes in the context. As is the case with the spread of infectious diseases, the spread of consumer epidemics is “sensitive” to the social context, the “condition and the circumstances,” in the places and the times they emerge. The context is like the magnifying lens that lets consumers zoom at something, seeing it in ways they never saw or paid attention to it before. Consumers can imagine things they never imagined before, longing for goods they never longed before, stirring up emotions and schemes of actions that create a passion for one product or another. People are always able to produce imaginations of good (or better) life, imaginations that motivate them to actions that attempt to flesh out that imagination... We take desire to be such passionate imagining. But such motivations and the schemes of action are always social, that is, they are shaped by, and expressed in, a given social context. In modern societies, this fleshing out of desire often takes the form of consumption; hence, the notion of consumer societies and consumer desire. The same message can make a different impression under different conditions and circumstances in different times and places. “Epidemics are sensitive to the condition and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur. In Baltimore, syphilis spread far more in the summer than in the winter. Hush Puppies took off because they were being worn by kids in the cutting-edge picnics of the East Village-an environment that helped others look at the shoes in a new light.”