Friday, May 19, 2006

Word of mouth: Mostly offline and positive

The nature and tone of word of mouth, by the numbers:

56: The average number of times an American discusses brands in ordinary conversations every week.

72%: The percentage of brand-related opinions delivered from a person to a family member or personal friend; 13% are delivered to co-workers and 7% are delivered by a professional or expert on the topic. (I suppose that puts us marketing bloggers in the distinct minority.)

41%: Number of conversations about brands that reference an item seen or heard in the media or in marketing material; 15% refer to an ad, 8% refer to a form of editorial or entertainment content, 5% refer to a point of purchase item, and 4% refer to the lowly coupon or other promotion.

62%: Percentage of marketing-related discussions described as "mostly positive."

9%: Percentage of marketing-related discussions described as "mostly negative."

92%: Percentage of word of mouth conversations that occur offline; 71% of those occur face-to-face, and 21% occur by phone.

The numbers are courtesy of a new study (PDF) from the Keller Fay Group.

Previously research by Walter Carl at Northeastern University revealed that 80% of word-of-mouth conversations occur offline, but his sample group was primarily college-age students.
It's pretty clear, though, that the most word of mouth occurs primarily while we're not sitting in front of computer screens.

Source: http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/2006/05/most_word_of_mo.html