Month: November 2011

I found Jackie Huba’s post about WOMMA’s new statistics about word of mouth marketing very interesting, and though I would share this on my blog. 

No matter how great technology has advanced and people’s lives have moved from the offline to the online, the power of word-of-mouth marketing is still too strong to brush aside. People’s confidence in making consumer decisions based on other’s vocal recommendations is still much higher than based on online reviews and website content. To me, the most surprising statistic was how “Odds are, if someone’s talking, it’s a good thing.” and that the average online review was 4.3 stars out of 5. I always thought that if people were talking, it would be a bad thing because usually people are more passionate when they are upset and have had a bad experience. Instead, it seems like people tend to have mostly positive experiences and then decide to post their recommendation online. No wonder companies always have customer review options! There’s a very low risk of having a bad product review!

The video is on the Consumer Evangelists’ blog and is also created by WOMMA, to define word of mouth marketing. Not only was it an excellent video because of its intricate and easily understood drawings, but the content was presented in a very clear and concise manner. I especially liked how they defined word of mouth marketing as any business action which earns a customer recommendation, delivers the best product in a category, providing a great customer experience, and rewarding customer loyalty. This break down allows me to think of business in its essence – to gain recommendations from customers and  free marketing! 

The WOMMA Summit occurred less than two weeks ago, wouldn’t it have been an interesting learning experience to hear from word of mouth marketing advocates? 

Tony’s recent blog post shares with his readers the year-old Call of Duty  advertisement that features Kobe Bryant and Jimmy Kimmel, among other ‘soldiers’ who can be identified as people of all walks of life. One can easily identify medical technicians, kitchen staff, hotel concierge, office executives, and construction workers in the advertisement, whose slogan at the end is “There’s a Soldier in All of Us”. It is interesting that the commercial included regular actors as well as celebrities such as Kobe Bryant, the top NBA player of the past decade, and popular comedian Jimmy Kimmel. The mixture of people helps to make the slogan believable, and the audience can truly imagine him or herself in the role of a soldier. The short ad is effective because of this factor and although Tony discusses the controversial aspect of the violent commercial, there are no explicit scenes in the ad that should need to be censored, and the rating warning is sufficient for the market. Furthermore, the environment the commercial takes place in is not a neighbourhood or mall where one could easily imagine and replicate, so the company has reasonably accounted for dangerous reactions from the public. I appreciate the commercial because of its originality and am relativity confident that a celebrity’s choice in revenue source does not affect its fans’ mentality to run out and shoot people with machine guns.