If you want to influence a consumer's purchasing decisions, then it's almost always best to get to their family and friends first. If you can convince family and friends to recommend a product or service, then you're a long way down the road to making the sale. But how, just exactly, do you get friends and family to make a recommendation? That is the grail that most marketers seek and few find.
According to ZenithOptimedia, word-of-mouth (WOM), specifically those recommendations from family and friends, ranked highest in purchasing influences in the firm's Touchpoints ROI Tracker study.
Scored on a grade of one to 100, recommendations graded out to an average of 84. The next closest influencers were TV ads (69) and internet searches (67). Magazine (60) and newspaper ads (55) were next followed by outdoor (45), radio ads (42) and banner ads online (41).
Bruce Goerlich, ZenithOptimedia's president of strategic resources, North America, told AdAge.com that marketers understand the importance of WOM but haven't figured out to make it scalable.
"Word of mouth is incredibly powerful, but we as an industry are not doing as good a job as we could do in generating it," he said.
Lawrence Feick, professor of business administration in the University of Pittsburgh's Katz Graduate School of Business, told BizReport, "The sea change is that for 40 years marketers knew that word of mouth was important, influential, pervasive. But they saw it as something to be described and hoped for."
"It is only in the last 10 or 15 [years] that they have thought about it as a communication tool that can (at least in part) be managed," he added.
Discussion Questions: How do brands that generate positive word-of-mouth and personal references do it? How is it that (any brand you'd like to identify) is able to generate recommendations from family and friends when others do not?