Word-of-mouth 15 times more influential than advertising

Over the past several months, we’ve surveyed almost 5,000 consumers in 26 major markets to learn more about how word-of-mouth affects consumer decisions.  It turns out that word-of-mouth is three times more important than any other factor we measured (and 15 times more influential than advertising). In fact, 74% of consumers say a friends recommendation is the most important factor when deciding whether to try a new business.

Interestingly, we found that customers recommend their favorite local businesses as many as 27 times per year and these recommendations are acted upon 64% of the time resulting in 17 new customers.

Stay tuned as I’m going through all the data now and will be posting more results soon.