Book Review: The Anatomy of Buzz, by Emanuel Rosen

The Anatomy of Buzz: Creating Word-of-mouth Marketing

Lowest used price: £13.99 GBP
Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Profile Business; New Ed edition (15 Oct 2001)
Language English
ISBN-10: 1861976151
ISBN-13: 978-1861976154

Synopsis (From Amazon)
When buying most things consumers rely heavily on personal recommendations from friends and family, colleagues and peers - and sometimes even strangers. Yet most marketing still focuses on advertising and other tools to influence each customer individually, ignoring the fact that buying ‘conversation products’ is a social process.

The Anatomy of Buzz is the first book to show how to help customers influence each other through word-of-mouth, using case studies and concrete example:

• Why did it take cameras 50 years to spread from professionals to the public?
• How did Sun Microsystems use the networks to spread the word about Java?
• How did the makers of Trivial Pursuit create huge demand for the game almost overnight?
• How did Nintendo create unprecedented buzz for Super Mario Brothers?

Word-of-mouth has long been recognized as a powerful marketing tool. As customers grow ever more skeptical they may not listen to adverts, but they do listen to their friends. This book tells how to do it successfully.

My Thoughts
This is one of the only books that I can recall that looks at the word-of-mouth phenomenon that not only made sense, but did not look at the subject as a management activity for modern marketing. While Edward Bernays often recounted fascinating tales of how public relations helped move products by setting fashion, he never focuses on the face-to-face aspects of how new ideas spread.

Mr. Rosen has done a sound job of providing a number of interesting, behind-the-scenes examples as well as a context for thinking about word-of-mouth marketing. The book’s main weakness is that it focuses on word-of-mouth about products rather the broader question of how word-of-mouth creates opinions in all areas of society.

Mr. Rosen defines buzz as “the sum of all comments about a certain product that are exchanged among people at any given time.” Naturally, you can have either good buzz (It’s great!) or bad buzz (Avoid at all costs.).

It is easy to us to underestimate the power of these comments before we consider our own experiences. For example, if audiences hate a new movie, the word soon gets out and ticket sales plunge. In addition to learning more about how buzz works, this book also offers guidance on how to encourage and accelerate that buzz.

The book is divided into three parts: The first looks at how buzz spreads (a small percentage of all the people do all of the connecting together of information networks); the second examines what makes for success with buzz (having things people want to talk about and encouraging that talking); and the third details how to stimulate buzz for your business (this is summarized in a workshop for you in chapter 16).

Publishers, book authors, music companies, companies that provide breakthrough technology (the iPod), and people who make exciting consumer goods (like the BMW) will get the most benefit from this book. The examples and lessons best apply in those markets. People with limited marketing budgets should consider the book also to help organise the questions to ask oneself for stimulating interest in a product.

After you have finished reading this book, I suggest that you step back and consider how you could improve the value of what you make for your customers and potential customers, reprice it to make it more accessible, and reduce your costs so that you have more resources to share with your customers and other stakeholders. In that way, you will have something better to buzz about!

Provide great products first!

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