Measuring advocacy and WOM

At Dub we've been deliberating for some time now how to measure advocacy - call it a marketers predisposition! It seems others are asking the same question. Matt Rhodes over at FreshNetworks has posted an interesting viewpoint gathered from a session with Kingston University's Professor of Consumer Behaviour, Robert East.

Matt explains the five principals to bear in mind when trying to measure WOM as:

1. Don't confuse word of mouth with satisfaction - only a small proportion of word of mouth is prompted by a satisfactory or dissatisfactory experience

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

Categories: WOM.