Deciding How to Educate Potential Customers
Word-of-mouth advertising is largely a matter of education - determining what information you want to be known about your business, and whom you would like to disseminate that information to others.
What Does Your Business Do?
Many businesses, even small businesses, have difficulty providing a succinct description of what they do - and if they do have a brief statement, it tends to be vague. An accountant provides "accounting services" and an attorney wants to provide for all your legal needs. Such statements are virtually useless.
Rather than considering the broad range of all tasks that a business is capable of performing, look at it from the customer's perspective: what specific need does the business fulfill for the majority of its customers?
Err on the side of discretion: your average grocery store sells a lot more than groceries - but if it tries to position itself as a vendor of food, cookware, paper goods, trash bags, hardware, consumer electronics, cosmetics, greeting cards, shoe polish, candles, and so on, then the purpose of the business will be vague to the consumer.
Providing Information on Businesses in Established Fields
The drawback to simplicity is commoditization: if you are a gas station, what makes you different from all the other stations within driving distance of your target market - why should they choose you over them? If you are in an established field, these differences are your key selling points that you want people to value, and to talk about to others.
A handful of examples are provided of businesses who go the extra mile to provide good service to their customers - a mattress store, a bank, and a bail bondsman. My sense is that this is dependent on the precise nature of a business - but in each example, it focuses on ways in which it can serve the needs of its customers rather than utilize its existing assets to generate more profit.
Businesses in New or Obscure Fields
Selling a service people haven't heard of before presents a different challenge: they probably do not perceive a need for it at all. In this instance, your sales message is your core service (the need it fulfills) and the way in which your method of filling that need is superior to existing alternatives.
For small local businesses, there is value in community outreach. Examples are given of businesses that do demonstrations at local events (a booth at the county fair) or offer "classes" that are related to their products (not infomercials - these courses convey information that is useful even to someone who doesn't buy the product).
Finally, do not underestimate the need to educate customers: while a product may be successful, there are always individuals whom it has not reached, or users who will see it as a fad unless they are reminded of its utility.
Who to Educate
The author suggests that educating the most naive customers is not necessarily the most cost-effective method of introducing your product. Getting an unfamiliar user to adopt a strange product is very difficult, and the likelihood of their becoming a knowledgeable frequent user is low.
The recommended target is users who have some exposure to a product, but little knowledge of its application and increasing their awareness of the product and knowledge of its use. They tend to be the people to whom others will turn for advice (not the fanatic geek, but a person who seems to know a little more than they do about something)