by: Matt Rhodes
This morning we spent some time with Robert East, Professor of Consumer Behaviour at Kingston University. His research focuses on word of mouth and brand loyalty and we spent the morning talking about how you can measure these things and in particular critiqued the Net Promoter Score as an approach to this.
One of the outcomes from the session was an initial set of five principals to bear in mind when trying to measure word of mouth. We’re going to be bouncing these around and building on them internally at FreshNetworks, but if you have any comments or can add to the debate let me know:
- Don’t confuse word of mouth with satisfaction – only a small proportion of word of mouth is prompted by a satisfactory or dissatisfactory experience
- Measuring word of mouth by the likelihood to talk (positively or negatively) about a brand misses the critical element – the impact the word of mouth has. A better measure is based around how people act when they receive word of mouth (positive or negative) – how this changes their propensity to purchase
- Anybody can be an advocate and pass on positive word of mouth. It’s more important to activate the whole user base than to try to find a particularly segment of advocates
- The world is just more positive than negative – that’s the way people think about things. So you should expect more positive word of mouth than negative
- One size doesn’t fit all – people are just more likely to talk about some products than others. Recommendations are more important for a dentist than they are for a supermarket. So you can only compare brands at the category level; indeed a different measurement tool may be needed by category
Original Post: blog.freshnetworks.com/index.php/2008/04/16/measuring-word-of-mouth-some-principles/
