The word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing panel began the way any good marketing panel should: with a definition. “WOM is defined as the likelihood of someone to positively recommend a product.” These days, loyalty is what many strive for in marketing, not just customer satisfaction, as even satisfied customers are all too likely to switch. With the advent of services like Froogle, the effects of branding dissolve as soon as side-by-side price comparisons are available. Therefore, the company whose customers sell harder will take share from those whose customers are more often detractors than not.
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Basically, yeah, it works.
It began with the givens: online advertising has been shown to be an effective means of driving direct response. In support of this, Dave Smith, CEO of Mediasmith and our moderator, rolled out the fact that more than 1,500 studies found in favor of the internet as a branding medium. Rebecca Lieb presented the only other sure thing in correlating offline results with online activity: e-coupons. She went on to note several other methods of tracking activity between the two channels, useful when an e-coupon for $1 off your new Wega won’t exactly cut it:
- data exchange: providing one’s email address signifies intent to purchase, if not an actual sale
- on-pack: where customers enter codes from physical products online for some reward in what is essentially the e-coupon mechanism backwards, e.g. the Pepsi-iTunes promotion
- recipe cards: which goal is to guide a customer to perform a certain behavior
- stat sheets: a checklist of sorts, for a product with multiple features
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