Advertisers spend $1 billion on word-of-mouth marketing

PQ Media recently released a report on word of mouth (WoM) marketing. The goal of WoM is to get consumers talking, since research from Keller Fay Group shows that "trusted recommendations" are the single best form of advertising in the US. 80 percent of surveyed consumers trust recommendations offered by friends and family.

 

Getting people to make those recommendations is the goal of WoM marketing, and PQ believes that advertisers will drop more than a billion dollars on in it 2007. A natural place for such campaigns is social networking sites, and Facebook's new Beacon system makes it an attractive prospect for advertisers. PQ says that WoM is most-used to push food and beverages, media and entertainment, and sports and recreation.

 

Still, writing in Adweek a few days ago, Prof. Wendy Melillo argues that marketers shouldn't be dropping more traditional forms of advertising just yet. "What I do think is foolish is when marketers completely toss out the old ways before the new methods have proven their worth," she writes. "Word-of-mouth marketing is not yet the DVD that replaced the VCR."