Archive of tag "study"

What the community expects from vendors looking to participate

July 30, 2009

A recent survey of 3,000 global IT decision-makers by Toolbox.com and PJA Advertising and Marketing, highlighted by PJA’s Mike O’Toole on MarketingProfs, offered some insights into what communities expect from vendors looking to participate.

As we often say, engaging with the talkers in your industry is one of the essentials of building relationships that lead to sustainable, long-lasting word of mouth. This study of IT professionals provides some fundamental findings that can be extrapolated to any industry, most notably of which is that vendors are more than welcome – with 76% of respondents saying it’s important that vendors participate in online communities (which echoes a 2008 cone study that showed 93% of social media users believe brands should be involved in social media).

Here’s Mike on what survey respondents expect from vendors looking to participate:

Respondents value transparency, responsiveness, (improve products based on feedback), and relevant content. Interestingly, they don’t care that much about give-aways or members-only benefits. Participate on the same terms as everyone else, and enrich the community as a whole rather than a chosen few. Egalitarianism, not exclusivity, is the dominant ethic in communities.

Learn More:

See the survey

See Mike’s MarketingProfs post

See SAP’s Mark Yolton on building vibrant communities

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Word of Mouth Research: Brand names that are easy to pronounce outperform complex brand names on the NYSE

July 29, 2009

A study highlighted in Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive — the fantastic book by Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, and Robert B. Cialdini — revealed that companies with names that were easy to pronounce outperformed companies with complicated names on the stock market.

In both controlled studies using fictitious company names as well as real-world samplings of brands traded on the NYSE, researchers Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer found that companies with highly-fluent names consistently outperformed brands with complicated names.

In one experiment using a random sampling of 89 companies traded on the NYSE with IPOs between 1990 and 2004, Alter and Oppenheimer found that if a person invested $1,000 in the 10 most fluently named companies and the same amount in the 10 least fluently named companies, the investment in the first group would outperform the second group by $333 in just one year.

The Lesson: Don’t shoot your word of mouth (and the overall potential of your brand) in the foot by giving yourself or your products names that are difficult to pronounce, search for online, or share with a friend.

Learn More: See the study

[Update: After double-checking the research results, it looks like our original title of "Word of Mouth Research: Brand names that are easy to pronounce are worth 33% more on the NYSE" is at best merely plausible, and at worst, just plain wrong. Apologies for any confusion, here's the actual figures from the study:

"To emphasize just how successful investing in fluently named stocks would be, we calculated how much a $1,000 investment would yield when invested in a basket of the 10 most fluently named shares and the 10 most disfluently named shares. The fluent basket would have yielded a significantly greater profit at all four time periods: $112 after 1 day, $118 after 1 week, $277 after 6 months (all Ps < 0.05), and $333 after 1 year (P < 0.10)]“

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Word of mouth research: How Etsy is an international word of mouth phenomenon

June 15, 2009

Etsy – the online marketplace where people set up shops to sell handmade goods – is a global word of mouth phenomenon according to the company’s 2009 International Seller Survey results and highlighted by Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb.

When international sellers were asked how they first heard about Etsy, an overwhelming 57% cited word of mouth and blogs.

In addition to using word of mouth to find Etsy, the vast majority of sellers use it to help people find their stuff. The study found that 85% of sellers use social networking to promote their Etsy shops, with the most popular tools being their own blogs, followed by Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace.

See the full study.

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Word of mouth research: Social media spending outpacing other interactive channels

April 29, 2009

Social media spending in the US will increase from $716 million this year to more than $3.1 billion in 2014 – that’s a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 34% – according to a forecast from Forrester Research released last week.

Other findings include:

  • At 27%, mobile marketing will be the second-fastest-growing budget item
  • At 17% CAGR or less, other channels are expected to experience — at best — about half the growth rate of social media

Learn More: Paul Gillin

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