Word of Mouth Marketing - Essay Example

Techniques to promote a firm's product have been created and modified to come up with a superior marketing strategy with excellent results. Word of mouth marketing which is also regarded to as viral marketing nowadays emerged as one of the most efficient tools in marketing in product promotion, customer recruitment and retention. This paper will try to address the perceived advantages and disadvantages of word of mouth. This paper will give a closer look at word of mouth marketing and how it affects buyer behavior.

To further examine the potency of word of mouth as an effective marketing tool, experiences of practitioners will be evaluated. Disadvantages and costs of word of mouth marketing, especially its inaccessibility will also be looked into. According to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (2006), word of mouth marketing is the ability to harness the voice of the happy customer for the good brand while acknowledging that the voice of the unhappy customer is equally as powerful (and equally detrimental) to the brand.

However, it should be noted that word of mouth is often not an intended marketing strategy for goods and services companies as they do not exert direct effort in the "creation" of word of mouth. Instead, word of mouth can be indirectly promoted by firms by ensuring the quality of the products that they offer to customers. No amount of marketing effort can encourage word of mouth but through the collective effort of the whole company in achieving the goals of marketing-creating products and services that gives customer value.

Traditionally, word of mouth is done through the face to face social interactions of individual. However, a new trend has emerged in word of mouth marketing together with the revolutionary development in technology. The most important technological innovation which rapidly introduced change in word of mouth marketing is the internet technology. This revolution led to the establishment of viral marketing as a type of word of mouth marketing. Viral marketing refers to "marketing technique that exploits pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in brand awareness through viral processes similar to a spread of an epidemic (Viral Marketing 2006).

" It should also be added that viral marketing is a word of mouth "enhanced" and "delivered" online as it takes advantage of the internet technology to reach a huge number of people rapidly. Viral marketing includes the use of blogs, amateur websites and other forms of astrosurfing that facilitates word of mouth.Word of Mouth and Buyer Behavior It should be noted that word of mouth marketing takes advantage of both power of human voice and social interaction among customers. A relationship between