WOM CH1-5

I strongly agree that all marketing efforts must be ethical. Especially nowadays the internet makes everything spreads so much faster, I must pull out an old Chinese saying, "Paper can never hide a fire". Good news are hard to spread, but bad news usually travel farther than we expect. I also agree that I trust real strangers on the web than advertisements. Before I bought a curler on Amazon.com, I skipped the product description and went straight to comments. Those are comments written by people I never met and probably never will meet in my life! Another important point that makes me think is the fact that WOM marketers must make the topic EASY to talk about. I am starting to think that a doctorate degree may not help in this field of study. Should I still think about getting a doctoral in Marketing someday? Last but not least, marketing efforts should also be invisible. Giving your customer a voice can be very risky though. "Let the customers do the talking" is almost like "let your people govern the nation". This raises an important question that I wish Joe Barnes, my respectable professor, can answer. How are you sure if your message will get across and come through the invisible-ness? How do you take care of the unintended consequences (i.e. people got confused about what product you are trying to promote, or people did not even realize that you are promoting a certain product until some news reporters spread the "truth" that such and such viral video was fake)?