Advertising is the cost of being boring

If your customers won’t talk about your stuff, you have to pay newspapers and TV shows to do it for you.
But when people trust you, they are willing to put their words on the line for you. Please them, inspire them, and they’ll bring their friends to you.
What are your other options? Bore them — and be forced to spend millions in advertising to get them interested. Annoy them — and watch your customers walk away, taking their friends with them.
Word of mouth marketing is more than just marketing.
It’s a simple new philosophy: Earn the respect and recommendation of your customers and they will do the rest. Treat people well and they will do your marketing for you, for free.
It’s about making your stuff and your company worth talking about. What can you do today that will make someone want to tell a friend about you?

Would anybody tell a friend? It’s an important question. It’s a question that raises the bar, that makes you better, that changes your company forever. You only have two choices: Be so special    that people want to talk about you — or buy advertising. Be interesting — or be invisible. Because being good is different than being worth talking about. Making a good product isn’t good enough anymore. Everyone does that these days.

Advertising is the cost of being boring. If people won’t talk about you for free, you have to pay them to do it. There is a direct relationship between being buzzworthy — earning word of mouth — and how much you’ll have to pay to promote yourself through paid marketing. Give people a reason to talk about you for free, or you’ll have to buy advertising to get the message out. It’s easier, more fun, more rewarding, and more profitable to focus on being remarkable and earning the type of fans and followers who will promote you, for free, forever.

These big ideas should be taped to your computer monitor, stuck in your wallet, and hung in your conference room.

via gaspedal.com