Weekly WOM: WOM wins big over other media

Media Life magazine reports on a study done by BIGresearch on the effectiveness of various advertising media. The big winner? - WOM! The study found that 92.5% of consumers regularly or occasionally avoid advertising (no surprise there), but that of those, more than 40% say they're influenced by word-of-mouth. The Media Life reporter interviewed the VP of research for BIGresearch who had a number of interesting comments to share. My favorites:

"Just because a group of advertisers are out in the marketplace spending more and more money doesn't mean everyone has to keep clogging up the world to try and out-shout everyone else."

"The No. 1 combination for watching TV is being online at the same time, so people should be able to opt-in and request information rather than having it pushed on them.

If marketers start realizing this, they'll see that less can be more because the frequency will make advertising a more scarce commodity. I think that's where the message has to be."

"You need to address the individuality of the consumer and you need to be much more targeted based on what media they prefer, the dayparts in which they prefer it, and the formatting they prefer."

The bottom line here appears to be that less is more. I'm so glad that more marketers are beginning to acknowledge this. If some of them don't reign in their tendency to fill in every communication channel with untargeted messages of little value, they'll only make consumers more resolved to tune out and ruin it for other marketers. Respect the customer by getting to know them and sending them relevant stuff. Then they'll listen.

Categories: neat_trends | research_and_reports