As part of my explo­ration of brand­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tion around the world, I am start­ing a series of inter­views with as many Euro­pean and world-wide movers-and-shakers as are will­ing to sub­mit them­selves to my bar­rage of prob­ing questions.

I was inspired to start this series of inter­views while at lunch with today’s inter­vie­wee, Mar­tin Oet­ting, part­ner and direc­tor research at trnd. We met at a bistro in Pren­zlauer Berg, a trendy neigh­bor­hood in Berlin, where Mar­tin lives. We ate and talked and real­ized we had both a lot of thing and a lot of peo­ple in com­mon. After we both ped­aled away on our bikes, it occurred to me that it would be super cool to be able to share all of this great stuff with you – and it would be great to be able to ask a bunch of ques­tions to as many peo­ple in the brand­ing, new media, and com­mu­ni­ca­tions as possible.

With no fur­ther ado, here’s my inter­view with Mar­tin Oet­ting:

1 — Mar­tin, would you please tell me a lit­tle bit about trnd AG and what ser­vices you offer?

Sure, and first of all: thank you very much for your inter­est! trnd AG is the brain child of Rob Nikow­itsch, who was cre­ative direc­tor in the web agency H2OMEDIA in Munich. In 2004 he started to believe in the idea that brands should actively work with their fans and enthu­si­asts, to sup­port and inspire word of mouth, as the most con­vinc­ing form of brand com­mu­ni­ca­tion. On a train ride between Munich and Salzburg (in Aus­tria), he sketched out an approach which trnd is still using today. When he arrived in Salzburg, he was thrilled — feel­ing that he had invented a rev­o­lu­tion. How­ever, he then con­ducted some online research and found out that sim­i­lar approaches had already been devel­oped and launched in the US a few years ear­lier — so, slightly miffed but over­all rather encour­aged, he launched trnd, together with co-founder Torsten Wohlrab.

trnd is a word-of-mouth mar­ket­ing plat­form — it has its own com­mu­nity of nearly 100,000 mem­bers. For a cam­paign, we select those mem­bers most suit­able and most enthu­si­as­tic about the project and the brand, and we invite them to test, expe­ri­ence and share the new prod­uct with fam­ily, friends, col­leagues, and acquain­tances. (And they often end up even talk­ing to strangers!) Addi­tion­ally, we encour­age them to report to us what they think, what their friends think, how the prod­uct is per­ceived, and — impor­tantly — to how many peo­ple over­all they spoke about it. That allows us to mea­sure, ana­lyze and report the results of the campaign.

2 — Would you tell me a lit­tle bit about what you do as part of the TRND team?

I am one of the share­hold­ers, and I have two respon­si­bil­i­ties. On the one hand, I try to spread the word about what we do. Word-of-Mouth Mar­ket­ing as a dis­ci­pline does not yet get the same atten­tion and inter­est in Ger­many as it does in the US. So it needs its own Word-of-Mouth Mar­ket­ing… The notion that Word of Mouth is some­thing you can actu­ally work with, have an impact on, and should make one of Marketing’s respon­si­bil­i­ties, is only slowly catch­ing on. So in order to help mar­ket our ser­vices, I spent the past two years speak­ing at con­fer­ences and with poten­tial clients, talk­ing with jour­nal­ists, and blog­ging about what WOM Mar­ket­ing is, how it works, and why it’s useful.

My other job deals with the data we col­lect. In any given cam­paign, we col­lect sev­eral thou­sand reports from the par­tic­i­pants, and we con­duct sev­eral sur­veys that our par­tic­i­pants fill out. Turn­ing all this data into mean­ing­ful results that show our clients what the cam­paign has deliv­ered is very impor­tant. I am work­ing with our cam­paign teams, to con­stantly improve the qual­ity, analy­sis and pre­sen­ta­tion of our data.

3 — Isn’t TRND a lit­tle like Buz­zA­gent in Amer­ica?

It is indeed, and BzzA­gent is one of the com­pa­nies that Rob dis­cov­ered after he ini­tially thought he had uncov­ered a secret no one else knew …

In 2004 already, I had the plea­sure to meet Dave Bal­ter (founder and CEO of BzzA­gent) at Ad:Tech in New York, and today we are hav­ing a fairly fre­quent exchange of ideas and best prac­tices with BzzA­gent. Par­tic­u­larly because it is very inter­est­ing to see where approaches in the US dif­fer from the ones we have in Ger­many, and where they are sim­i­lar or even iden­ti­cal. This exchange of ideas has been so fruit­ful that we just launched the next step in our col­lab­o­ra­tion — jointly with BzzA­gent and Buz­zador from Swe­den, we can now offer our ser­vices as a com­bined net­work with 750,000 mem­bers, through whom we can directly reach upwards of 9 mil­lion con­sumers in 10 coun­tries. Which is some­thing no other WOM mar­ket­ing organ­i­sa­tion can match, — some­thing we are really excited about!

4 — What do you think makes the Ger­man mar­ket unique?

On the one hand, it’s the biggest Euro­pean mar­ket — so there is a lot of potential.

On the other hand, Ger­many has a cul­ture that does not embrace (mar­ket­ing) inno­va­tion eas­ily. There is a lot of “has this been tried and tested?” being asked, and a lot of the “not invented here”-syndrome is going on. And peo­ple don’t like it very much when you speak too openly about your own prod­uct or ser­vice — quickly they per­ceive you as “too com­mer­cial”, as “too salesy”.

Also, gen­er­ally speak­ing, mar­ket­ing as a pro­fes­sion does not get a lot of atten­tion. It is very dif­fi­cult to place inter­est­ing new approaches in other media than the trade press. Some­times a story would merit the atten­tion of a wider cir­cle of peo­ple, but peo­ple tend to think “Mar­ket­ing? That’s only adver­tis­ing, get outta here”.

The upside to this is: if you have the per­se­ver­ance and the stub­born­ness to keep at it, you can actu­ally estab­lish a good busi­ness — once you have man­aged to cut through the skep­ti­cism and the rejec­tion. But it takes time and patience. And a lot of pas­sion, to weather the ini­tial dif­fi­cult years.

Another thing that peo­ple should bear in mind: we do not have a blo­gos­phere (and twit­ter­sphere) that has the same level of matu­rity as in the US. In the US, it makes per­fect sense to reach out to the social media space and try to build expo­sure for a brand or prod­uct that way. Here, it’s mostly a waste of time. For two reasons:

One, as described above, any­thing overtly com­mer­cial gets quickly torn to shreds.

Two, you get no reach. Here is an illus­tra­tion why: today (6th of Jan­u­ary 2009), Germany’s biggest blog­ger Robert Basic (with the high­est num­ber of inbound links) thought pub­licly about sell­ing off his blog, and start­ing some­thing new. Again, we are talk­ing about the biggest and best-known Ger­man blog. (Pop­u­la­tion: 80 mil­lion.) When he him­self was judg­ing how much he thought he could pocket from sell­ing the blog, guess what he thought would be the range: 10,000 to 100,000 EUR.

Whack.

That is noth­ing. Blogs are no real media prop­er­ties here. Imag­ine what peo­ple expect to make who would be sell­ing the biggest US blogs — even in a time of cri­sis? Of course I do not know if Robert is right; and his blog is very closely linked to him as a per­son. And yet, it shows you the dif­fer­ence in magnitude.

This is why, by the way, we at trnd focus on offline word of mouth for now.

5 — What do you per­ceive the dif­fer­ence is between doing this sort of WOM work in Ger­many as opposed to the united states?

You have to use a slightly dif­fer­ent tone. Con­sid­er­ing what I wrote above, about being per­ceived as “too com­mer­cial”, you have to adopt a much more cau­tious voice. The exchange with the par­tic­i­pants in a WOM project has to be more about a joint fun expe­ri­ence, in which the par­tic­i­pants see very clearly what is in it for them.

I some­times get the impres­sion (which may be entirely inac­cu­rate) that in the US — at least in some cases — you can almost get away with enthu­si­as­ti­cally extolling the virtues of a prod­uct and then telling peo­ple ‘Now tell all your friends about it!’. Which would totally and dev­as­tat­ingly back­fire over here.

6 — Is there any­thing that frus­trates you about the European/German mar­ket?

Yes — in Ger­many, there is too much talk and too lit­tle action. You won’t believe how many blog posts lament, dis­cuss, pon­der, con­sider, … the var­i­ous ways in which social media mar­ket­ing could actu­ally be con­ducted, and how it should be mea­sured, and what good it would do.

And then com­pare that with how few peo­ple actu­ally DO some­thing in the field. It’s really frus­trat­ing. And when you join the dis­cus­sion on a blog and start talk­ing about what you have DONE, and what you have LEARNT, some­one will invari­ably accuse you of “just pitch­ing your stuff” …

Again, it’s not easy to mar­ket expe­ri­ence. You’re very quickly sus­pected of being too commercial.

7 — Since you’re a WOM scholar in addi­tion to being in the WOM busi­ness, how has mar­ket­ing and pro­mo­tion changed in Europe over the last sev­eral years? Ten year?

I see a two step process, really. There is always the avant garde which gets over-excited about some­thing very early, very quickly. They are usu­ally much too quick to adopt, too quick to build hopes and expec­ta­tions. And then there is the vast major­ity who are really slow with the adop­tion. And they only adopt if you show them a work­ing solu­tion. Yet when they do adopt, it can get pretty big. The trick is to find the sweet spot right between the two groups, where you can estab­lish the busi­ness, let it mature, and then be really ready when the mar­ket wakes up. We are secretly hop­ing that we might have man­aged to do that with trnd.

8 — Where do you see your Mar­ket, Ger­many, evolv­ing?

Right now, any devel­op­ment is dif­fi­cult to pre­dict. Ger­many is so very dif­fer­ent from the US in that no one over here actu­ally owns shares. The Ger­man peo­ple is not a share­hold­ing peo­ple. So unlike in the US — where a sharp fall in stock val­ues imme­di­ately affects every­body … and I mean EVERY­body — here that isn’t so.

You see a falling index curve on TV or in the papers, and then you go on your merry way, because that is “just banker stuff”. So the aver­age man on the street is not yet affected. We do, how­ever, get affected once the world stops buy­ing our stuff. This entire coun­try lives on export­ing our goods all around the globe. So when orders are can­celed and other coun­tries don’t buy any­more, then the Ger­man every-woman and –man will feel it, too. But that is hap­pen­ing more slowly. Maybe slowly enough so that we can get through it with­out being severely affected, before things pick up again … maybe?

A fac­tor that plays against us are the media here. They are hell-bent on mak­ing every­thing look as gloomy as they pos­si­bly can. So in Decem­ber, while peo­ple were busy buy­ing up every­thing they could get their hands on in the Christ­mas sea­son, the papers were almost get­ting annoyed with Ger­mans who wouldn’t, despite clear orders from the media, behave recession-like. (I am exag­ger­at­ing. But only slightly.) My fear is that, if noth­ing else, the media will soon make every­one switch to reces­sion mode … Because after all, we’re not an opti­mistic peo­ple. Quite the con­trary. Things are always bad. And after that they will get worse. Naturally.

9 — How was the Inter­net and mobile com­put­ing changed the mar­ket­place?

Big ques­tion. Hard to answer. The Inter­net is really chang­ing every­thing upside down, isn’t it? The most impor­tant change brought about by the Inter­net is that it so dras­ti­cally reduces the cost of inter­ac­tion. I, as a sin­gle indi­vid­ual, can today keep in touch with roughly 2,000 peo­ple through my blog, Twit­ter, and a cou­ple of social net­work­ing sites. Now imag­ine a com­pany with thou­sands of employ­ees that encour­ages every employee to use these tools … Man, if you use the web the right way, mass mar­ket­ing could be over, and com­pa­nies could build their brands entirely through con­ver­sa­tions. The poten­tial is immense.

And about mobile com­put­ing — I used to be very skep­ti­cal about it all. Until the iPhone. Once there is a plat­form that links every­thing together as seam­lessly as this, it becomes so incred­i­bly com­pelling. I am not an expert in mobile mar­ket­ing, but finally, after so many years of empty announce­ments regard­ing the mobile space, it seems that the future is finally arriving.

10 — What do you wish com­pa­nies would think about before con­sid­er­ing WOM cam­paigns?

Oh man, thanks for this ques­tion! I wish they thought more about their prod­ucts! More than any other approach, WOM mar­ket­ing needs some­thing worth talk­ing about. When you want word-of-mouth mar­ket­ing to work, an adver­tis­ing cre­ative who’ll “engi­neer some talk­a­bil­ity” into an ad is no help at all. Because talk­a­bil­ity of an ad gets you nowhere. You need talk­a­bil­ity of a prod­uct. Peo­ple can talk about ads until the cows come home, but that’s not going to sell products!

So my plea to any mar­ket­ing com­pany is: with every new prod­uct you put out, let there be some­thing in it that is worth talk­ing about. I don’t mean that you have to make the next iPhone. But there has to be some­thing that your prod­uct does bet­ter, qui­eter, faster, cleaner, more eco-friendly, … any­thing that peo­ple can really expe­ri­ence. Some­thing that they try and then say “Hey, this works!” Because then they do what’s best for your mar­ket­ing — they share it with their friends!

Word-of-Mouth Mar­ket­ing can only facil­i­tate this, and organ­ise it on a large scale. But the ini­tial poten­tial has to be in the product.

11 — What are the biggest mis­takes that com­pa­nies make when they enter the WOM space, be it online, in street teams, etc?

There is one that I hinted at above — some believe that a bor­ing (or bad!) prod­uct can get fixed by the cam­paign. Never. In this space, the con­sumer calls the shots. You can only iden­tify the peo­ple who love you, or who believe that you have some­thing excit­ing to offer, and then let them decide what’s worth say­ing about your prod­uct. No “com­mu­ni­ca­tions plat­form”, no script­ing the con­ver­sa­tion. It’s all about excited con­sumers with a prod­uct to share. Period.

The other thing is related to the above: some think they can actu­ally con­trol the mes­sage — either by allow­ing or not allow­ing com­ments on cer­tain web­pages, or by hir­ing peo­ple who act under­cover and pre­tend to be con­sumers, and try to infil­trate net­works and social envi­ron­ments. First of all, under­cover stunts most likely blow up in your face any­way, they are dis­re­spect­ful, and in Europe, they are also being banned legally. But more impor­tantly, mar­keters need to under­stand that mes­sage con­trol is over. Actu­ally, it never existed in the first place. Because even in the good old days, when four peo­ple would sit in front of the TV and patiently endure the com­mer­cial break (?), they would dis­sect the message:

“The actor looks silly.” “Do you think that prod­uct does what they claim?” “Nah, that’s just mar­ket­ing spin.” “Hate the music. So annoy­ing.” “I think the neigh­bor has one, she says it’s not so bad.”

So insist­ing on con­trol­ling the com­mu­ni­ca­tion that’s out there in the mar­ket is just not use­ful. What you can do instead: be trans­par­ent, get involved, par­tic­i­pate, lis­ten, and give con­sumers every pos­si­ble oppor­tu­nity to talk about your prod­uct — in the way they see fit.

12 — Is there any advice you could give mar­keters and adver­tis­ers that you have learned in your expe­ri­ence as a WOM scholar and in your time at trnd?

If you asked me to describe in only one word what word-of-mouth mar­ket­ing is all about, then I’d say: “Lis­ten­ing.” As soon as com­pa­nies start to lis­ten to what their con­sumers want to tell them, and show them that they do lis­ten!, the whole play­ing field starts to shift. It is very dif­fi­cult to really describe the effect it has on a fan when the brand actu­ally turns to her and says “Hey, so that is what you think? Tell me more!”

For some, that’s as if the lead singer of their favorite rock band came down from the stage and said to them directly: “So, tell me, what should my next song be about?”

The prob­lem is: what is the last thing that many adver­tis­ing cre­atives or mar­ket­ing direc­tors want to do? Exactly, lis­ten to thou­sands of con­sumer voices. That is still per­ceived as so much less cool than design­ing the next mil­lion dol­lar ad cam­paign. Which is what many peo­ple went into the busi­ness for. But it all goes back to mes­sage con­trol — the con­sumers are in con­trol, and it’s time to give their mes­sage design the atten­tion that it deserves. Because they keep spread­ing it, 24/7. Which is why Pete Black­shaw said: “We must repo­si­tion cus­tomer ser­vice as the new media department.”

13 — Is there any advice you could give com­pa­nies who are inter­ested in try­ing out WOM?

Two things, maybe: one, try to build some­thing talk­a­ble into your prod­uct, as said above.

And then, two, remem­ber word of mouth for your mar­ket research. You can ask a mil­lion things in focus groups. But do not for­get a cou­ple of sim­ple ques­tions about word of mouth: “Would you talk to your friends about this prod­uct? And if so, what would you tell them?” If you only get blank stares when ask­ing this, you might have to go back to square one … with­out any word-of-mouth poten­tial, it’s dif­fi­cult to have sub­stan­tial mar­ket success.

14 — Is there any advice you might give Amer­i­can brands before mov­ing into the Ger­man (or Euro­pean) mar­ket?

I can­not really talk about all of Europe — too many coun­tries, all of them too dif­fer­ent from each other. But in Ger­many, my advice would mainly rest on what I said above: bring patience, endurance, be pre­pared for resistance.

15 — You had men­tioned the Clue­train Man­i­festo.  What is your take on the Clue­train Man­i­festo and how well (or how badly) has it aged?

I think when it came out, most peo­ple didn’t really get it. Myself included. Today, we are all try­ing to turn it into mar­ket­ing real­ity. It’s still a com­pass, and a guide­line to keep in mind. These guys were way ahead. It’s amaz­ing. I had the chance to meet David Wein­berger a few months ago. Fol­low his Twit­ter stream, read his blogs & books, if you want to laugh and stay ahead of the curve.

16 — Are there any books, writ­ings, blogs, or peo­ple you might rec­om­mend read­ing or fol­low­ing?  Who do you rec­om­mend?

Gen­er­ally, I am not so good with keep­ing up … I should fol­low 50 blog­gers, when in fact I only fol­low a hand­ful. I am always kind of hop­ing that “impor­tant news find me”, as some dig­i­tal native (which I am def­i­nitely not) was quoted last year somewhere.

17 — Tell me about what a Doc­tor­ate in WOM looks like.  Can you tell me more about your degree pro­gram.  Do you rec­om­mend this type of course of study?

In Ger­many, doing a Doc­tor­ate is slightly dif­fer­ent from the US. Here, a doc­tor­ate is still mainly a research project that an indi­vid­ual car­ries out, writes up into a book, presents to a cou­ple of pro­fes­sors, and then pub­lishes. Busi­ness schools here are start­ing to imple­ment actual Doc­tor­ate pro­grammes. My school, the ESCP-EAP Euro­pean School of Man­age­ment in Berlin, is one of them. I am grate­ful to have ben­e­fited from their Doc­tor­ate pro­gramme because it opened my hori­zon beyond mar­ket­ing issues, to what sci­en­tific research actu­ally means, and how the social sci­ences have to be crit­i­cal of themselves.

Whether or not I can rec­om­mend it depends on what some­one wants, and where they work. I under­stand that in the US, a PhD is really the path to an aca­d­e­mic career. Not so much over here — you will find that here, a doc­tor­ate can also help careers in busi­ness. My own moti­va­tion was a slightly dif­fer­ent one — when I decided to pur­sue a doc­tor­ate early in 2004, I felt that very few peo­ple in mar­ket­ing actu­ally knew how word of mouth really works. So I thought I could get a head start by actu­ally doing some sci­en­tific research about it. Also, Buzz / Word of Mouth mar­ket­ing guru Dr. Paul Mars­den con­vinced me at the time that it’s great to be active on both sides of the fence — in the aca­d­e­mic realm as much as in the prac­tice of busi­ness. I found that he is right.

18 — Is there any shame­less plug­ging you would like to do on behalf of what you’re up to or what TRND is up to?

I do, actu­ally, yes: I’d like to return to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with BzzA­gent and Buz­zador. In 2000, as I was start­ing in adver­tis­ing, I was get­ting intrigued by the idea that mar­ket­ing could be con­ducted in a dif­fer­ent way — in a way that worked with and not so much against the consumer.

Fast for­ward, to 2009. Today, we can con­fi­dently say to clients such as P&G or Wrigley: with our col­leagues BzzA­gent in the USA and Buz­zador in Swe­den, we organ­ise for you a trans­par­ent open dia­logue with con­sumers in 10 mar­kets — USA, Canada, Eng­land, Swe­den, Nor­way, Den­mark, Fin­land, Ger­many, Aus­tria and Switzer­land. Through this dia­logue, the most enthu­si­as­tic con­sumers get in touch with the brands they love, and become ambas­sadors who spread the word about them among their friends in a way that is much more effi­cient than any other media chan­nel. That is a devel­op­ment that I would have never been able to pre­dict. And that’s some­thing which we, at trnd, are cur­rently really excited about offer­ing our clients.

19 — Please feel free to cre­ate any other ques­tions that you would pre­fer me to ask and then feel free to answer them — hell, I am a blog­ger and not a reporter.

Oh boy, I think I have more than over­stretched your and the patient read­ers’ time. Thanks to every­one who stuck it out this far …

Mar­tin Oet­ting is part­ner and direc­tor research at trnd AG the real net­work dia­logue, Germany’s first spe­cialised Word of Mouth Mar­ket­ing net­work (www.trnd.com). A fre­quent speaker and an author­ity on Word of Mouth and Web 2.0, he also just fin­ished his Doc­tor­ate dis­ser­ta­tion on Mar­ket­ing and Word of Mouth, at ESCP-EAP Euro­pean School of Man­age­ment (Berlin). Pre­vi­ously, he worked for Grey Global Group in var­i­ous posi­tions, on Euro­pean and national accounts. Mar­tin has a Master’s degree in Busi­ness, after study­ing in Ger­many, France and Eng­land.Chris Abra­ham is co-founder and prin­ci­pal of Abra­ham Har­ri­son LLC, an inter­na­tional con­sult­ing group with spe­cial­ties in online word-of-mouth/conversation mar­ket­ing and online busi­ness & tech­nol­ogy strat­egy advis­ing. See his pro­file, con­tact Chris via email, Twit­ter, or leave a com­ment below.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post