According to the new survey done by Brand Science Institute marketers in Europe are scared to use Word-of-Mouth (WOM) campaigns to promote their products.
The reasons:
-Campaign impact is not clear or measurable. My opinion — Of course it can be measured, the tools are there and plenty of case studies of successful WOM.
-Language differences across Europe, WOM campaigns would have to be launched in many languages to reach as many consumers as in US. My opinion — True, but there are still very large markets in Europe and not all word of mouth campaigns in the US are national.
-Lack of professional WOM advertising agencies in Europe and campaigns launched by traditional agencies mostly fail. My opinion — This is not surprising if agencies don’t know where the influential are or are not upfront with consumers or make bad decisions on what to seed, when etc. But it’s a new market and more robust methodologies and experienced agencies are emerging.
-Cultural differences - Great Britain, France and the Scandinavian countries are open to and developed in WOM marketing, while in Germany, Italy and Spain there is almost no use of these tools. My opinion — This is also connected to number of bloggers and general use of social media. We believe fundamentally that this will change, especially given that youngsters in “less developed” countries are using social media tools.
Going Forward — While there is some fear amongst marketers, BIGresearch reports the increasing importance of WOM for consumers: 30% of consumers buying a car trust opinions of other private consumers (the most trusted source for buying decision, the next is TV broadcasts with 24% and reading a news article with 21%). This figure increases to 43% for electronic purchases for which opinions from other consumers are the most trusted decision support. This looks to me like a huge gap between consumer behaviour (i.e. trust, decision support from recommendations) and European marketer’s activities which don’t venture into WOM for the reasons mentioned above.
QED – There is a missed opportunity for many companies AND early activity in this space, with credible agencies and robust measurement will have above average Return on investment.