Today, we live in a world where products are ubiquitous. With the speed of communication, and transparency of the web, even the most innovative businesses have a very small window of opportunity to have a true USP. For example, Samsung introduced the world to its Galaxy Tab tablet device a mere five months after the iPad was first released.

Some marketers will tell you it is business as normal, that digital channels such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube just represent new opportunities to communicate. They simply add to the more traditional vehicles such as direct mail and telemarketing. The fundamental principles of marketing, however, have not changed. These marketers are wrong.

“The Google policy about a lot of these things is to get right up to the creepy line but not cross it” declared Eric Schmidt when he was Chairman and CEO of Google. This statement was made during an interview with The Atlantic editor, James Bennett, for The Washington Ideas Forum in October 2010.

As early as 1967, Professor Johan Arndt from the Colombia Graduate School Of Business identified ‘word of mouth’ as “one of the most important, if not the most important source of information for the consumer.” As time marches on, ‘word of mouth’ only becomes more influential.