3 Word of Mouth Case Studies

By Zoe Boalch

Each month we take a look at which word of mouth and advocacy campaigns have inspired us. This month we'll be looking at Lagerhaus' Blog-Up store, Bongo Bingo's advocacy campaign where they reward their top 30 advocates in Belgium and Nivea's Xmas friendship wrap-up campaign from the UK.

Case Study 1: Lagerhaus: Blog-Up Store

Online stores are a dime and dozen nowadays, so when you're launching a new one, how do you create a loyal advocate base? Swedish interior design retailer Lagerhaus did so by creating the first ever 'Blog-up stores'.

Prior to opening their online store, Lagerhaus aimed to develop a strong online fan base, in order to ensure a successful launch. They identified exactly where their target market were spending their time - interior design blogs. From here, six influential interior design bloggers were invited to participate in "blog-up" stores. These stores were housed on the blogs, and items sold were those specifically selected by the bloggers themselves! This helped to ensure the individual bloggers were personally involved in the project, and so would create valuable, genuine recommendation and promotion. Not only that, but by handpicking their favorite items, the bloggers' stores were tailor-made to their readership. The campaign resulted in an increase of 226% of Lagerhaus Facebookfans and interactions by 360%. By inviting only these 13,000 fans to the online launch, Lagerhaus found the perfect fan base to advocate the brand, and spread the word about their online store.

Case Study 2: Bongo Bingo celebrate 10th birthday with top 30 sharers

Bongo Bingo, an experience voucher company in Belgium is turning 10. To celebrate this milestone birthday, they've set out to find their top 30 advocates and sharers. Their aim? To reward them for their support with a chance to win a trip to the Maldives! They've given away 9 trips randomly already, and for lucky number 10, they're generating a strong WoM campaign, and letting the consumers fight it out amongst themselves.

Brussels-South Train Station will play home to a treasure-hunt, with the tickets hidden amongst 5,000 Bongo Bingo boxes. 30 people will be chosen to take part, based on their 'ranking' - determined by how much they've spread the word about the competition. The more they've shared, the higher up they can go in the ranks and secure an invite.

The integration of on and offline in this instance is particularly well employed, ensuring people establish a fun physical connection with the brand, and have something to talk about before, and after the event (regardless of whether they win or not). The minimal 30 advocate places cleverly push the 'exclusivity' angle, while establishing a ranking system through WoM, guarantees user generated promotion, and a higher level of exposure in social media.

Case Study 3: Nivea literally wrap-up friendships via Facebook

Nivea have launched a quirky social/WoM campaign that incentivizes Xmas shoppers to purchase a Nivea gift pack. By bringing to life friendships, the cosmetics brand have created an additional reason for UK shoppers to buy Nivea over other brands this year.

Via an app on their Facebook page, they are offering personalized wrapping paper starring you and a friend when you buy a Nivea gift pack for Christmas.

The app prompts you to select one of your Facebook friends and then automatically pulls all photographs featuring yourself and your friend (you must both be tagged in the picture) to feature on the wrapping paper.

What's clever about this app is that Nivea have tapped into emotional friendships and have created a genuine reason for people to buy what could be considered as a relatively stale product by getting creative with technology. Once the gift has been given, the Nivea brand becomes a part of the friendship too.

The only thing I'd like to see improved is that the technology is still quite clunky at this stage - the app pulls ALL photos with you and your friend which includes group shots and it can be tedious to manually re-select which photos you want included.

In my opinion this is still great use of technology & WoM principles.

Zoë Boalch is co-founder of Sydney based specialist agency Contagious Agency.

Contagious Agency specialise in Advocacy & Word of Mouth marketing and have developed WOM Advocacy campaigns for Sony Australia, Unilever, Paramount Pictures, Bacardi Lion, Visa and more. Contagious also own the Contagious Network - a free hub to connect social & opinionated consumers.