The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 4

The Decision Process

A major goal of this book is to help you speed up the decision process by using word of mouth to make it easy for your customers to navigate the decision path. So, we’d better understand the steps in the decision process, where people get blocked, and how to encourage the kind of word of mouth that will remove these specific blocks.

Almost all marketers think of their industry as specialized and their products and customers as special. They are right. But underneath the profound differences in products, customers, and industries, there is an underlying structure to how word of mouth influences the decision process. By understanding this structure and adding the particular qualities of your industry, you can encourage ...