Guerillas in your midst
31 May 2007 | Steve Bagshaw
You’d like to think you can trust the opinion of your friends and colleagues to tell the truth, but perhaps you might not be able to for much longer.
“Word of mouth” selling is the latest PR craze, with agencies signing up "agents" to wax lyrical about their products and services to anyone who will listen. One US firm has signed up 250,000 people to carry out this kind of guerilla marketing.
Don’t think that this is a US-only phenomenon either, the same firm signed up 3,000 Brits on its first day of operation.
It got us thinking about whether this would ever catch on in procurement. Are you more likely to trust the opinion of a fellow buyer in selecting a supplier?
What other underhand sales techniques have you had to deal with in the past?
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This was actually pretty well described by William Gibson in Pattern Recognition, back in 2003.
Last year, Penny Arcade did bit of an expose on its use online. Companies were paying people to establish a number of identities in internet forums and then use these for marketing purposes.
A lot of forums are very wary of “spammers” coming along and going on about new sites or films or bands. Therefore, these people took their time to build up trust and acceptance as members of the community.