Word-of-Mouth the most powerful selling tool

Despite an ever-expanding array of advertising platforms and sources, consumers around the world still place their highest levels of trust in other consumers, according to a recent global Nielsen Internet survey.  The survey found Filipinos and Brazilians (67%) to be the most trusting overall of all forms of advertising, while trust among Danes (28%), Italians (32%), Lithuanians (34%) and Germans (35%) were the lowest in the world.  Ads in newspapers rank second worldwide among all media categories, at 63% overall, while television, magazines and radio each ranked above 50%.  Such advertising scored best in Latin America and most poorly in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa regions.

Although consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising among 78% of the study's respondents, Nielsen research found significant national and regional differences regarding this and other mediums. Word of mouth, for example, generates considerable levels of trust across much of Asia Pacific. Six of the top ten markets that rely most on "recommendations from consumers" are in this region, including Hong Kong (93%), Taiwan (91%) and Indonesia (89%).  At the other end of the global spectrum, Europeans, generally, are least likely to trust what they hear from other consumers, particularly in Denmark (62%) and Italy (64%). 

The reliability of consumer opinions posted online - which rated third, at 61% overall - also varies throughout the world, scoring highest in North America and Asia, at 66 and 62% respectively.  Among individual markets, web-based opinions such as Blogs are most trusted in South Korea (81%) and Taiwan (76%), while scoring lowest, at 35%, in Finland.

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