Highly Recommended: Harnessing the Power of Word of Mouth and Social Media to Build Your Brand and Your Business

CHAPTER 10Identify

Discovering Those People Whose Recommendations Influence Your Brand’s Purchase Decisions

Imagine if one of the world’s biggest corporations, a company with more brand-name subsidiaries than most companies have product descriptions, were to make the radical decision to shift focus away—to the tune of billions of marketing dollars—from traditional paid TV, radio, and magazine print advertising and drive its marketing focus instead toward WOM or, in their words, “one-to-one marketing.”

That’s just what Procter & Gamble did when in early 2012 it announced its intention to slash $10 billion in costs over the next five years by switching to more digital marketing strategies and progressing toward what the company’s CEO calls “one-to-one ...