How emotional connection ignites Word of Mouth Marketing
By Ted Wright February 25, 2019
By Ted Wright
I have true admiration for Gwyneth Paltrow. I am deeply in love with how she is using her advocate personality to create an authentic and trusted business.
Gwyneth is building her company goop based on her ability to share things she loves. And we pay attention to her because we have this unique emotional connection to Gwyneth that not all stars can claim. There is an interesting lesson here for all of us who love word of mouth marketing.
When you’re making a movie, there is a lot of down time on the set, and so when she had a moment, Gwyneth would write and then send out a “newsletter” to her friends discussing all the cool products that she was discovering and loved. She wasn’t doing this a fakey paid “influencer,” she was doing it out of her authentic passion for the products and her love of sharing stories with her friends.
Her friends love Gwyneth and they loved her ideas so her newsletters morphed, over time, into the business that we know as “goop.” The newsletter and now goop are an extension of her passion and heart. Today she is making a killing selling all kind of lifestyle items and she’s even moving into live events.
Emotional connection ignites word of mouth marketing
Not every celebrity could pull this off. People see her movies and they’ve read her book and they think they know her. This is different from say, Sylvester Stallone. Sure, Sly is famous, but do we really know him? Sure I’d want him on my side in an intergalactic war but he’s not going to sell me hand cream.
Fame can help you sell a few things fast, but having people feel that they know you – establishing that emotional connection – is key to a long-term business value as an advocate.
Gwyneth has an advantage over the rest of us in that she makes movies that are distributed all around the world. She certainly has a head start on anybody else trying to establish an emotional connection to a large audience through their content.
But a lesson here is that producing content alone, or having a goal to be a YouTube star won’t work unless you’re building trust and goodwill with the audience. To build a business based on fame, it’s not enough for people to “know of you.” They have to feel like they really know you in a meaningful and emotional way.
Ted Wright is the founder of Fizz, the world’s leading word of mouth marketing (WOMM) agency. Ted is also an acclaimed WOMM keynote speaker and the author of Fizz: Harness the Power of Word of Mouth Marketing to Drive Brand Growth.
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