Steve Rubel writes in his post “Jack Trout Fishes for a Hook” that Jack Trout is incorrectly hammering word-of-mouth marketing in Forbes. I have to agree with Steve’s words:
“File this under man bites dog. Marcom guru Jack Trout is throwing a big dark cloud over word-of-mouth marketing (including blogging) because there’s no way to control it. What’s worse, he’s urging folks to just advertise instead.”
I mean, c’mon. WOM is for real and it can be stimulated.
Here is a tiny bit from Jack’s article.
“Now for the really bad news. There’s no way to control that word-of-mouth. Do I want to give up control and let consumers take over my campaign?”
Oh Jack, where have you been for the past five years? We all lost control a while back. We can no longer simply count on the old black magic of :30 TV commercials. Where has Jack been? Want the bad news… Jack is paid by major advertisers like AT&T, P&G and IBM to assist them with their brand strategies.
I’ll let Steve’s words do more of the talking about Jack. But, this Troutism reminds me of his ex partner Al Reis’s book “The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR.” Al gets it wrong too. He hammers advertising and praises PR. He sites Starbucks as a brand that grew without any advertising and just great PR. Well, if I had 6,216 street corner locations I wouldn’t need advertising either. And, by the way, who ever said that we can control what a writer ever writes?
The bottom line you ask? In today’s marketing world it takes a holistic approach. Do the ads, do the PR and do the WOM. Whatever it takes. It isn’t either or.
March 11th, 2006 at 4:44 pm
Peter;
This is an age issue. He just does not get it. it is as simple as that. Why Forbes would publish this opinion is beyond me.
Joel
March 12th, 2006 at 3:03 pm
And for this one…. why are we still listening to Jack Trout? Maybe its the older Forbes crowd. But…. aren’t they the CEO’s of the companies that still spend the advertising money in all the old-dumb places?
C
March 15th, 2006 at 5:09 am
Relative to the comment about his PR book, over a few decades in the agency business, my own businesses, and being CEO of 3 internet companies, I have to say I’ve never seen PR work. That’s not to say there are not great, proven case histories out there, but I’ve seen so much money thrown at PR, with no discernible effect, so many times as to dismiss it out of hand when suggested.
I was CEO at Gorp.com, the largest online adventure travel site. We had an active PR department, which was generating what I was told was about 100 million impressions a month in print media. It was accounts of trips you could book on our site, or references to the great travel content we had. Our own research could trace almost no booked trips to PR, and eventually, I shut down the whole effort to save the money. There was no measurable effect on either sales or page views as the print impressions dwindled.
We would occasionally get a mention in the main travel story on Sunday in the NY Times travel section, and the following weeks we could measure no impact, either in phone calls or clicks.
April 4th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
In response to all the chatter about Jack Trout’s comments on word-of-mouth marketing, Trout invited a group of “buzz evangelist” to face off with him on his radio program. Steve Rubel and Rick Murray of Edelman, Emanuel Rosen of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, Seth Godin, Joseph Jaffe and Errol Smith (me….producer of Trout Radio) sat down to deconstruct the buzz around word-of-mouth. I listened to all the arguments before sitting in on the roundtable discussion to end the series and concluded that rumors of Jack’s passing are indeed greatly exaggerated… You can hear the interviews at the roundtable wrap up at:
http://www.jackstreet.com/jackstreet/WJCK-SteveRubelE.cfm
and the entire series at:
http://www.troutandpartners.com/radio/Strategy.asp