Global WOM best-practice (Crest - P&G)

Yes, as I've said before, this blog is indeed supposed to be half English-half Turkish. There we go...

Just read about WOM in an article about consumer enpowerment & interaction with brands on brandchannel.com, written by Randall Frost:

"...Wipperfurth also raises fundamental questions about brand identity. If your brand is hijacked by a local community that has little visibility among mainstream consumers, there is probably little reason to be concerned. But if your hijackers belong to a highly visible counterculture and your product has traditionally sold to the conservative working class, you might have a problem. In such cases, Wipperfurth recommends that brands develop personas (masks)—as opposed to a consistent brand personality—that can be put on or taken off at will, depending on the target audience.

Crest Whitestrips serves as one of his case studies. Whitestrips was launched before there was much interest in teeth whitening products, and the brand manager at P&G decided to distribute the product over the web before making it available through retail, in hopes of generating word-of-mouth buzz. The company was able to determine from its website traffic that the product had become extremely popular with brides, teenage girls, young Hispanics and gay men, so it heavily targeted those groups with print ads, posters, and postcards. According to Wipperfurth, the approach led to a twelve-fold increase in the size of the teeth-whitening category in less than two years. "

More to come soon on Turkish best-practices about WOM (e.g. J Kafeterya)...