Conversational Capital: How to Create Stuff People Love to Talk About

Book description

“In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell presents an important idea without any ‘how to.’ Now Bertrand Cesvet provides the ‘how to’ you need to create ‘Tipping Points’ for your business and success. This book is a compelling presentation of a powerful idea. This is how the new world will do business. Highly recommended if you care about your future.”

Stewart Emery, coauthor of international best-seller Success Built to Last

“Ultimately, magic is unexplainable. Still, Conversational Capital provides the most insightful analysis of what makes our shows ring in the heart of fans.”

Guy Laliberte, founder, Cirque du Soleil

“Like all great ideas, Conversational Capital is at its core simple: word-of-mouth momentum can be created, harnessed, and used to build consumer passion for a brand better and more cost-effectively than almost any other marketing medium.”

Rupert Duchesne,CEO of Aeroplan

“Marketing is an art that Conversational Capital turns smartly into science. This book provides the complete prescription for getting consumers excited about your ideas.”

Jim Champy, coauthor, Reenginering the Corporation, and author, Outsmart!

Embed into Your Products and Experiences the Ingredients that Drive Advocacy:

  • Create products and services that consumers find truly significant

  • Intensify consumption experiences to transform your brands into market leaders

  • Don’t settle for serendipity: manage and control the word-of-mouth around your brand by manipulating eight powerful experience amplifiers

  • For all the books that speak of the value of consumer advocacy, few indicate how to create it to begin with. Armed with a compelling set of examples from their own work in fostering leading brands, the authors reveal the triggers of word-of-mouth and a process to embedding them in your own products, helping you create stuff people love to talk about. From Bertrand Cesvet, chairman of Sid Lee, a leading purveyor of experiential design and communications services that leverages commercial creativity for breakthrough brands including Cirque du Soleil, adidas, and Red Bull.

    1% of the proceeds from the royalties earned by the authors will be donated to the One Drop Foundation. The mission of the One DropTM Foundation is to fight poverty around the world by giving everyone access to safe water.

    Table of contents

    1. Copyright
      1. Dedication
    2. Acknowledgments
    3. About The Authors
    4. How This Book Came Together
    5. This Is an Open-Source Book
    6. Foreword by Hermann Deininger
    7. Introduction
    8. One. Defining Conversational Capital
      1. 01. What Is Conversational Capital?
      2. 02. The Eight Engines of Conversational Capital
        1. Rituals
        2. Exclusive Product Offering (EPO)
        3. Myths
        4. Relevant Sensory Oddity (RSO)
        5. Icons
        6. Tribalism
        7. Endorsement
        8. Continuity
      3. 03. How Conversational Capital Works
        1. Cirque Du Soleil
          1. Rituals
          2. Exclusive Product Offering (EPO)
          3. Over-Delivery
          4. Myths
          5. Relevant Sensory Oddity (RSO)
          6. Icons
          7. Tribalism
          8. Endorsement
          9. Continuity
        2. IKEA
        3. Schwartz’s—Montréal’s Hebrew Delicatessen
          1. The Schwartz’s Experience
          2. Seamless and Holistic
      4. 04. Why Conversational Capital Works
        1. Currency for the High-Saliency Age
        2. 1984: A Hallmark of Mass Communication High Salience
      5. 05. Conversational Capital Is Not Buzz
        1. Conversational Capital Must Walk the Walk
      6. 06. Conversational Capital and Advocacy
      7. 07. Conversational Capital Is for Everyone
    9. Two. The Engines of Conversational Capital
      1. 08. Rituals
      2. 09. Initiation
      3. 10. Exclusive Product Offering (EPO)
      4. 11. Over–Delivery
      5. 12. Myths
      6. 13. Relevant Sensory Oddity (RSO)
      7. 14. Icons
        1. People
        2. Buildings
        3. Physical Geography
        4. Objects
        5. Iconic Product Design
        6. Powered by Association
      8. 15. Tribalism
      9. 16. Endorsement
      10. 17. Continuity
    10. Three. Implementing Conversational Capital
      1. 18. Getting Started
        1. 1. Assemble the Right Team
        2. 2. Carry Out a Conversational Capital Audit
      2. 19. Designing a Solution
        1. Generating Insight
        2. Exercise Creativity
          1. 1. Get your story straight
          2. 2. Use the engines of Conversational Capital as your guide
          3. 3. Multiply your cultural references
          4. 4. Ask yourself where you can create the most market discontinuity
          5. 5. Challenge the status quo
          6. 6. Manipulate time
          7. 7. Ride the engines of Conversational Capital like a team of horses from hell
          8. 8. Borrow from other categories
          9. 9. Spot the unfulfilled need
          10. 10. When in doubt, improvise
      3. 20. Implementation
        1. Packaging
        2. Prototyping
        3. Monitoring
        4. Rolling Out
        5. Improvement
      4. 21. And Two More Questions
        1. Does Conversational Capital Make Economic Sense?
        2. Does Conversational Capital Apply to Consumer Experiences Alone?
    11. Glossary of Terms
    12. Financial Times Press

    Product information

    • Title: Conversational Capital: How to Create Stuff People Love to Talk About
    • Author(s): Bertrand Cesvet, Tony Babinski, Eric Alper, Sid Lee
    • Release date: August 2008
    • Publisher(s): Pearson
    • ISBN: 9780136064114