The most successful brands in the world today focus on delivering a better customer experience
Marketers have to ensure they have the right technology and customer data to allow them to deliver the right content and experiences across all the channels. While the present age consumers are flooded with wide variety of choices, the marketers are struggling to establish, stand out and deliver value to them. Marketing expenditures are increasing exponentially to discover ingenious ways for the products to reach, appeal and find their way to the customer’s shopping carts. With myriad complex touch points in a decision journey for customers that is constantly changing, tapping into the trends is a must for marketers and brands to win. Despite many available channels to connect with targets, reaching new prospects and converting them to sales figures is not synonymous. Marketing covers tactics from print advertisements to online strategies, to massive campaigns One tactic that is often overlooked, is “Word of mouth marketing”. Word of mouth marketing (WOMM) has been one of the most primitive promotional ideas practiced by marketers. This is based on the principle of pull marketing. The very basic and simplistic idea of WOMM (also referred to as “word of mouth advertising”) is that customers do the advertising for businesses. Every successful marketing platform/campaign, has been centred on the idea of getting the customers to talk about the brand/product. Word of mouth marketing is a powerful way to generate buzz for a business of any size and nature. Especially with today’s new technology of email, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, when one person starts talking about a brand, more and more people tend to join in. It’s the age-old tactic of “bandwagoning.” When people hear good things about a business, they feel inclined to join in the conversation. According to report by Nielsen, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from their friends or family more than any other form of marketing. One of the greatest misconceptions about word of mouth marketing is that it’s all new and happening online. The role of the internet and the new ways people use it to communicate are indisputably critical components of the sudden spread of word of mouth. Blogs and social media are a big deal because they empower lots of people to share ideas. But that’s only a part of it—only about 20 percent of word of mouth happens online. The majority of word of mouth conversations actually happen face-to-face. This paper aims to study the concept of WOMM, its nature and evolution over the years. It also discusses the effectiveness of WOMM through examples and explores a new approach to effectively deliver value to customers using WOMM.

Keywords: Consumer; Word of Mouth; Marketing Function.