Summary: The Hidden Persuaders

In The Hidden Persuaders, Rob Walker described what Word of Mouth (WOM) is, some background of a Word of Mouth company, joined companies and agentsЎ¦ beneficence after participation, and the related ethical problem.

In his article, Walker stayed that Word of Mouth is a untraditional advertising strategy in which companies, instead of selling advertisement on the public medias, have all different backgroundЎ¦s people to sign up as agents. WOM got rid of the conventional marketing strategy, selling products to main street Americans; instead, they have main street Americans to sell their products.

The WOM company, BzzAgent, mentioned in WalkerЎ¦s article is a three-year old company located at Boston. Its owner, Dave Balter, was working in loyalty marketing, which rewards long-term credit card users for not switching company, He has his WOM company built after reading an article about WOM.

Al Fresco was one of the company joined WOM. They have around 2000 WOM agents signed up, which was relatively impossible with other marketing technique. Because of the enthusiasm of agencies, the company have significant boost up on their market selling; for example, in some stores, they have a hundred percent selling increment.

WOM also gives benefit to agents. Balter did worry about the successfulness of BzzAgent at the beginning since the leak of reward. However, he found out that people who became an active agent