Ask HN: How to get word of mouth when customers heavily compete with each other?

[neerkumar]

To clarify: I often heard about building a great product and how that would lead to word-of-mouth advertising from your early customers. But in many cases, I feel customers are competing with each other and don't have any incentives in doing it. Say you are selling something to small restaurant owners and that actually drives sales up. I doubt they will go and tell other restaurant owners about that. And I feel this is actually a very common situation I never hear discussed.

[ikeboy]

If your customers are all in the same market, then it's not in their best interests for you to take on their competitors. This isn't simply, logistically, "how can I get the other market participants to know about me". This is an actual conflict of interest.

Especially if a company such as yours can help "saturate" a market (with no details, I can only speculate), you want to think carefully about whether you really should go after the entire market, and if your value would be less to each customer were you to have higher penetration.

To make up an example: there are companies selling templates for eBay sellers. The theory is the templates convert better than bland listings, and that therefore people using the templates have an advantage over those that don't. But if everybody uses them, the advantage to each may be greatly diminished.

It is also possible your solution doesn't make it any easier for companies to compete - in which case, why are they using it at all?

[danieltillett]

We have exactly this problem. We have found no solution other than to expect no word-of-mouth sales. We actually have a problem where our customers will tell their competitors that our product is terrible and not to use it so they can keep it for themselves.

[DoreenMichele]

The Iceland Principle.

[Darmani]

I'm interpreting the question to mean: if you are selling an enterprise product into a competitive industry, how do you do word-of-mouth advertising?

The answer is, to a first approximation: you don't. "Viral marketing" is a buzzword of the B2C sector. It exists in the BB sector, sure but it's never a dominant channel.

[tyingq]

Offer a cant-say-no discount to one customer in exchange for a press release. Then get some industry specific blog/magazine to publish it, or interview you about it, etc.

[detaro]

Does them heavily competing actually mean that they don't talk to each other? Are there special situations where they do anyways? (e.g. industry events). How large are they - over a certain size, employees are unlikely to take it that seriously to not talk to employees of competitors.

Do people regularly move between companies in the field?

Are there external companies/contractors hired by multiple companies in the field?

[magic_beans]

What are you asking?