Ads vs WOM
February 18, 2008 by Rosalind O’Rourke
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Is Word-of-Mouth Marketing (WOM) becoming more effective than Advertising? After reading through many a debate on the internet on this subject I decided it was time for me to do my own research on the matter so I could formulate my own well-informed opinion.
Advertising has been the most popular form of marketing for a number of years. Almost everywhere we look there is a blatant form of advertising, so much so that we are becoming desensitised to it. Ads are appearing in absolutely every medium imaginable and this saturation is turning people off the message. ‘76% of people don’t believe that companies tell the truth in advertisements.’ This shows that audiences are becoming more cynical and developing resistance to advertising, of course companies are going to say their product or service is the best, but with hundreds of these messages being fired at us every day it is hard to know who to believe.
If I want to go out for a nice meal with my boyfriend I very rarely go somewhere that hasn’t been recommended by a friend, this is because I don’t pay attention to ads because I am very aware that they are bias and I trust my friends as a more credible source of information. Also if I am watching the TV I tend to flick channels during the ad breaks or do something else until I hear what I want to watch coming back on, almost everybody I know does exactly the same thing. This proves to me that advertisements are not the most effective use of a marketing budget.
A smarter, more creative way to market is WOM. WOM is growing, thanks to factors such as the rise of communications on the internet. Customers are getting smarter and now need to know that something is good before they will pay money for it. They are in control. ‘92% of people trust word of mouth as the best source of new product ideas up from 67% in 1977.’
It seems to me that WOM is becoming the most influential media source, WOM is not about telling consumers what is good but about letting them discover it themselves, formulate their own opinions and spread them to their social networks. I for one appreciate not being commanded what I should think and I like the element of control that WOM allows. I am much more likely to act upon a recommendation from a friend or at least search for customer reviews on the internet than I am to act upon a flyer or an ad I see on the TV, radio, or newspaper.
Interesting post. It would be good if when you cite statistics if you linked to the source. This would help people who read your post and want to find out more about it.
I tried the following exercise in class today.
Who doesn’t use Google for web searches? No hands showed up.
Now, when and why did you first use Google (a company that’s only 10 years old)? The answers were almost all word of mouth recommendation, plus some press recommendation.
Google is the most spectacular example in support of the Al and Laura Ries thesis put forward in ‘The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR’.
Thanks for your advice Stuart, I’ve added the links to the sources, I’m slowly but surely learning how to be a good blogger!
Richard, I completely agree with you, everybody I know uses Google. The fact that it ia such a good product, and always has been, also contributes to its success as there are very few people with anything bad to say about it.
I would equate WOM almost entirely with PR. Advertising is quite different in that, almost by definition, it needs to stand out and be noticed. I think PR is the opposite: PR done well is almost by stealth. This is what makes it so hard to conduct meaningful surveys comparing/contrasting the two. There could be vast amounts of PR work contributing to a company’s success but you just don’t see it.