Word-of-Mouth Advocacy: A New Key to Advertising Effectiveness

Marketers are increasingly focused on social marketing, encouraging consumers to share content as well as recommendations, seeking more emphasis on consumer "expressions" and not just “impressions.” But how should expressions be achieved and measured? The authors argue for a holistic approach, one which recognizes that consumer expressions occur most often face-to-face and are not primarily the purview of online social media.

Word-of-Mouth Advocacy: A New Key to Advertising Effectiveness

Ed Keller and Brad Fay

The Keller Fay Group

Management slant

  • Marketers want their brands to be more social, seeking to activate consumer conversations about their brands.
  • To many, this means deploying social media strategies on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.
  • Keller and Fay argue that the much bigger social opportunity for marketers is where most consumer conversations happen: offline, and face-to-face.
  • Advertising and social marketing should not be in different silos because advertising has an important role to...

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