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Agent Wildfire - Backgrounder
When we started Agent Wildfire back in 2004, we asked ourselves three big hairy marketing questions: What actually works? What are we passionate about? And what is offered nowhere else in Canada? It didn't take much time or research to lead us down the road of organizing an entire business around word of mouth.
As we dipped into our pasts as senior marketing clients or agency people, we realized the stuff that we were proudest of, got us excited and actually built business was word of mouth driven (although we likely called it good streetwise marketing at the time).
For a variety of reasons, word-of-mouth is essential to business growth in today's marketplace and the facts are indisputable. In Canada, two out of every three purchase decisions customers make are because someone they know told them it was a smart move. Whether its restaurants, new gadgets, health products, sports equipment or entertainment launches, people simply trust, act on and enjoy word of mouth referrals from other people they know. It's the dominant business-driving influence in today's culture and marketplace and it's only getting bigger.
Yet in Canada, we've never met a client VP of word of mouth, an account director responsible for word of mouth and rarely have we seen a budget line code called word of mouth. In fact, very few Canadian companies have a process that attracts, harnesses and measures the word of mouth power of their best brand ambassadors. Strange, given that every client we meet seems to want it, they just haven't arrived yet on how to get it (or who to get it).
With paradox comes opportunity; what if a company could build the elements behind this "holy grail" of word of mouth and tap into the marketing power of consumer-to-consumer conversations. The concept of Agent Wildfire was thus born!
During our odyssey, we've had some people observe that word of mouth can't be effectively organized and harnessed - it simply happens by luck or hard work. We believe that's a costly and dangerous oversight and one that's simply not true.
Word of mouth and grassroots buzz is increasingly the result of shrewd marketing tactics from savvy large corporations, hungry start-ups and Canadian breakthroughs alike. Look at the reasons behind most of the successful new brands over the last 20 years and you'll find the evidence of well-organized word of mouth plans - Google, Ebay, Apple, Hotmail, Amazon, My Space - word of mouth! Red Bull, Starbucks, a host of Premium vodkas, Cirque du Soleil, Muchmusic - word of mouth! Lululemon, Swiffer, Blackberry, The Running Room, President's Choice, Robeez, Rethink Breast Cancer - again word of mouth!
So Agent Wildfire lives, breathes and sleeps word of mouth and all of its related cousins (buzz, viral, seeding, grassroots sponsorship, blogs, social media). Our team's motivation is to spread your brand's marketing wildfire and become your outsourced expert for generating your grassroots buzz.
People frequently ask us "why the name Agent Wildfire"? Well, we think it's a pretty cool and funky metaphor for what we do:
- we go about building the right ingredients to create a marketing spark
- we create marketing that starts small but spreads amazingly fast
- we ignite connections between brands and consumers
- we build ideas that can be spectacular to watch spread, sometimes popping up in the most unsuspecting places
- we create marketing wildfires that can have a tremendous force and leave behind a big, lasting impact
- with the right naturally occurring elements, we can exponentially grow your business
You bring the kindling; we'll bring the fuel and let's start building your next marketing wildfire!
The Agent Wildfire Team
Founder
Agent Wildfire is led by Sean Moffitt, who has played senior marketing and agency roles in leading the successes of some of Canada's most loved brands over the last 15 years. He has preached "practicing the perfect pint" for cult brand Guinness, launched Bubbas and conversation labels on national brand icon Molson Canadian, spearheaded innovation efforts on marketing leaders Procter & Gamble & Labatt and grabbed word of mouth by the jugular for other companies in leading agency roles. As president of Agent Wildfire, he is a passionate, some say obsessed, word of mouth expert that when not planning, launching and researching word of mouth efforts for leading Canadian clients can be found evangelizing about word of mouth at conferences and blogging about buzz at "Buzz Canuck".
Our team is comprised of word of mouth rainmakers operating out of Toronto.
Each employee, freelancer and affiliated partner is a passionate advocate and expert in their respective discipline of word of mouth, social media, grassroots and experiential marketing, community building, online media and web design, copywriting, direct mail, research and/or marketing operations.
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"Don't skate to where the puck is, skate to where it's going to be."
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Wayne Gretzky
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