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The Oprah Effect
Who wouldn't want Oprah's name attached to their product? She's a marketing dream.
Oprah Winfrey, the talk-show host most recently known for her Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa and her philanthropy work with the Angel Network, ushered in the summer season with a new episode of "Oprah's Favorite Things" this week in which she gives away bags full of her favorite things that can range from clothes to the latest in technology. Entrepreneurs and corporations would be lucky to have their products featured on her show. Oprah's personal selection alone has the ability to launch the success of many new products.
What does this say about Oprah's celebrity prowess? Her show has been a major catalyst for hungry advertisers. Jerry Needel, senior vice president of Nielsen BuzzMetrics, a consumer-generated media measuring service, says word-of-mouth advertising is always a powerful indicator of consumer engagement, according to an interview posted on Marketwire.com.
"Celebrity endorsements can help boost mindshare and market share, as yet another instance of the 'Oprah Effect' confirms," said Needel. "Marketers can observe this natural passion to better understand and leverage where passionate and influential consumers are directing their attention and trust."
As soon as Oprah introduces a new idea, everyone wants a piece of it. She is especially good at selling books of all genres. According to Marketwire, Oprah helped catapult three diet-book plans, including "YOU: On a Diet," "RealAge.com" and "The BestLife Diet" all within the last year.
Last year, when Oprah featured "YOU: On a Diet," created by Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet C. Oz, Nutrition*Buzz, an online discussion blog report from Nielsen BuzzMetrics, found that avid fans signed up for the nutritional plan almost overnight. The book became a No. 1 bestseller in the health and fitness categories selling 448,000 copies in 2007.
During the same program, nearly 11 million viewers chimed in on ways to gain confidence and energy using weight-management tools provided by RealAge.com as reported by Nielsen Media Research. Nielsen ratings found that the web site was among one of the top 15 most-visited health and wellness channels in 2007.
In January, Oprah featured "The BestLife Diet," a nutritional program created by Oprah's personal trainer Bob Greene, in both O: The Oprah Magazine and on her show, which garnered as many as 10.9 million viewers. So far the book has sold 376,000 copies.
This certainly isn't the first time Oprah has struck a chord with her audiences. A self-proclaimed avid reader and an education advocate, she became the first talk-show host to incorporate a book club into her program in 1996. Although the concept was new for TV viewers, book sales immediately skyrocketed to a level not seen for at least a decade. When she stopped her book club for several months, book sales plummeted.
According to an article featured in The New York Times, from 1996 to 2002, most book selections from Oprah's Book Club resulted in sales of more than a million copies each, a significant gain for an industry struggling to stay afloat. The 2004 study "From Obscurity to Bestseller: Examining the Impact of Oprah's Book Club Selections" compiled by Richard J. Butler and his team found Deep End of Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard, one of the first books featured on the show, held 71 weeks on USA Today's bestseller list as a result of Oprah's book recommendation.
In a statement with the Boston Globe, novelist M.J. Rose believes Oprah has single-handedly saved the book-publishing industry. Rose says as soon as Oprah picks a book, it's guaranteed millions of people will buy it.
"When a million books a month don't sell, that is a significant drop in readership," said Rose. "If you look at buying patterns, when a person goes into a store to buy a book, she is open to all the other books in the store, and most people buy more than one."
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