Articles

The importance of ‘Influence’ for brands online

In the back end of 2007 I attended an interesting event entitled ‘Reputation2.0’. At this event, Jo Rigby, from OMD (that’s Omnicom Media Group not the pop group) presented some very interesting research on ‘Brand Reputation and the role of influence’. Within this article I have reproduced some of the key findings of the report – all the data is from their report.

The research was carried out among 8,000 adults in the UK, Germany, Czech Republic and Denmark and had the objective of exploring the following key areas:

• Who is sharing brand experience?
• How are they doing it?
• Is it the same in each market?
• Is it category driven?
• How do consumers access it?

What OMD found makes interesting reading…

When asked if they had passed on their opinion to a friend, family member or colleague 54% of UK respondents said they had. This was the lowest of all the countries, Germany being 95%, Denmark 69% and Czech being 85%.

In the UK 63% of respondents proffered their opinion without being prompted, this compared to only 46% in Germany (Denmark and the Czech Republic were 60% and 62% respectively). However in Germany 43% of respondents were asked for their opinion, compared to only 27% in the UK.

When providing an opinion in Demark 79% of respondents passed on a positive opinion, whilst the UK was the lowest at 66% (Germany was 73% and the Czech Republic 69%). The UK led the highest number of negative opinions at 26%.

It appears that most opinions are passed ‘Face to face’ as this accounts for over 90% of the communication methods, opinions passed via a website are small; only 3% for the UK against 4% for Germany and 1% for both Denmark and the Czech Republic.

In the UK, 9% of respondents posted a review on a website specifically for others to read, this was higher than Germany (6%) Denmark (3%) and the Czech Republic (5%)

When reviewing categories that respondents pass opinions about there are a number of variations. For UK respondents passing on an opinion, 8% did so for restaurants,10% for entertainment, whilst only 6% for financial services. The highest category was for electrical goods at 12%. These were broadly similar across all the countries.

When asked what online research respondents did before buying a good or service 38% of UK respondents looked at consumer review websites, 21% looked at expert review websites, 33% looked at brand websites and 44% looked at retailer websites.

So what conclusions can be drawn from this research?

1. Not many customers place their brand opinions online but those that do have an overly important influence upon others who may be considering that brand.
2. People are more likely to pass on positive opinions but in the UK a significant percentage are likely to be critical.
3. Brands need to harness positive opinions and manage negative opinion.  This can be achieved by recognising the ‘pathway’ to the brand that customers may undertake.

For more information on this article or Aardvark Media, please contact us on+44 (0) 20 7582 7711.

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