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George Silverman joins WOMMA Advisory Board
George Silverman, President of Market Navigation, Inc., is a recovered and reformed psychologist (ABD for a Ph.D. in educational psychology). His primary interest is in the psychology of marketing, decision-making, persuasion and particularly word of mouth, for which the formal study of psychology had not prepared him, but 30 years of marketing consulting has.
His book, The Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing; How to Trigger Exponential Sales Through Runaway Word of Mouth was published by AMACOM in 2001.
He is the inventor of the telephone focus group, co-inventor of the peer word of mouth group (widely acknowledged to be the most powerful marketing method ever developed in the pharmaceutical industry), and has successfully used word of mouth techniques to accelerate purchase decisions for some of the most successful products ever introduced, including the VCR, the automatic teller machine, the Trac II razor, the NordicTrack and many of the most successful pharmaceutical launches in history. He is a past Treasurer and Board member of the Qualitative Research Consultants Association (QRCA), and has been Chairman of its Professionalism Committee.
George is also a close-up illusionist. He is the Workshop and Lecture Chairman of the Parent Assembly of the Society of American Magicians and a member of the Academy of Magical Arts (The Magic Castle) in L.A. He is one of the leading close-up magicians who convene yearly from around the world at the FFFF convention. It is the most exclusive, invitational only, highly prestigious close-up magic conclave. He uses illusions in his seminars and workshops to create a sense of open-minded wonder, to illustrate many of the illusions of marketing, and to instill a willingness to consider breakthrough possibilities.
About the parallels of marketing and magic he says, "I just like to remind people that things are not always as they seem, there's more than meets the eye, that you have to examine conventional wisdom because much of it is just very realistic-looking illusion, and most of all to remind people that they can do the impossible."