New research on word of mouth marketing
Boldmouth.com has recently released a research report on perceptions, practices & ethics in word of mouth marketing (pdf here).
Some interesting findings from the study include:
- 34.7% of study participants stated that they plan to use WOM marketing
- Nearly 64% of all survey respondents noted that WOM is either “very important” or “extremely important” to their overall marketing plans
- Interestingly enough, nearly 59% of respondents said that they had active WOM plans with an active WOM campaign in market
- Nearly 90% (89.9%) of all study participants noted that WOM was ethical
- 80% of organizations reach out to both customers and prospects
The numbers are probably a bit skewed in the positive direction, as a majority of early WOM efforts involve the the launch of a corporate blogging strategy – which fairly often does not result in any real word of mouth activity because of poor implementation.
Another interesting finding, reinforcing the need for companies to integrate their customer service into their overall brand communications strategy, is that 82.2% of respondent said that the “type of service that customers received” is what gets people talking, while 53.3% thought it was “satisfied customers.” Contrast that to 35.6% who think that what gets people to talk is “advertising they’ve seen.”
BzzAgents may have proven that you can “manage” the word of mouth channel for simple products – but can you really “manage it” for complex B2B products?
One thing is for sure – if your post-sale customer experience is not a good one, you will get a ton of negative word of mouth, and in this business, the mantra “any news is good news” clearly does not hold true.
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May 19th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
This post really raises some issues. Could Bzz agents potentially undermine their own effectiveness if they started WOM on a product or service that turned out to be bad? Would people start to distrust the recommenders? Would that distrust eventually spread to unsolicited testimonials? Bad news always travels faster and harder and longer than good news.
May 19th, 2006 at 6:26 pm
Thank you for taking the time to comment.
I think that the system has some built-in resistance to that kind of situation. First off, it would be hard to convince a large number of people, many of whom try the product first, to give positive WOM on a product that is bad – remember, they are not paid to say what they are saying – so in effect what is on the line is their personal reputation.
As for the comment “bad news always travels faster than good news” – apparently there is some new research that proves otherwise. I will try to put together a post on that this weekend…
October 2nd, 2006 at 11:20 am
WOM depends on good products AND also relevance. There have been many cases where the product is in fact very good, however timing or context has been wrong. However , all things being equal – hyping a product which is indeed poor will loose the peer credability which is all so important and damage the links on which WOM’s foundations are built.