Word of Mouth Advertising
by Fred on 07/08/06 at 11:44 am
2 comments
Some interesting stats from a new study from the Fay Keller group:
- 56: The average number of times an American discusses brands in ordinary conversations every week.
- 72%: The percentage of brand-related opinions delivered from a person to a family member or personal friend; 13% are delivered to co-workers and 7% are delivered by a professional or expert on the topic. (I suppose that puts us marketing bloggers in the distinct minority.)
- 41%: Number of conversations about brands that reference an item seen or heard in the media or in marketing material; 15% refer to an ad, 8% refer to a form of editorial or entertainment content, 5% refer to a point of purchase item, and 4% refer to the lowly coupon or other promotion.
- 62%: Percentage of marketing-related discussions described as "mostly positive."
- 9%: Percentage of marketing-related discussions described as "mostly negative."
- 92%: Percentage of word of mouth conversations that occur offline; 71% of those occur face-to-face, and 21% occur by phone.
I think the stats can pretty much apply to us here in South Africa. How important is it to keep up relations with your customers n’ clients?
Also, interestingly for us New Media folk, it shows that not much ‘word of mouth’ happens in front of our monitors.
(Thanks to Church of the Customer blog for this tag.)
Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. He runs a web marketing company called World Wide Creative and loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. View more articles by Fred.
Perky
Aug 9th, 2006
The scary thing for me about these stats is not just the need for keeping an ongoing relationship with our customers but how the hell do you make a noise when your message is so saturated? With so many companies vying for the customers attention its getting harder to be heard.
Fred
Aug 10th, 2006
The answer (in my mind) to your question, is that our marketing efforts should entirely focused on trying to initiate one relationship with one customer at a time. It’s way easier to capture 90% of mindspace with 1 customer than 10% of 1000 customers’ mindspace. This relationship can be automated, sometimes, but more often than not, it requires good ole fashioned values – delivery on time, keeping promises, etc.
This approach done with a handful of folk is often better marketing than trying to dilute a message over many folk.