Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

From end-cap displays to in-store signage, Shopper Marketing concentrates on capturing consumers at point of purchase, looking for ways to entice them as they stand in store aisles. But today, according to research from Influence Central, online reviews have transformed how consumers shop – arming them with authentic, credible insights that shape their purchasing decisions, both while in-store and well before they head out to the mall.

Below, Influence Central delivers in their own words the top three surprising ways online reviews have transformed traditional Shopper Marketing:

Ten years ago, AdAge published a survey of young adults which asked them what sources of information they trusted most to inform a purchase decision: nearly seven of ten identified word-of-mouth as the most influential tactic to them. This is when 2 percent of all adults used social media on any given day.

In 2015, social networks have demonstrably changed the word-of-mouth distribution model. Forty-seven percent of all U.S. adults use Facebook daily, 25 times the number of total daily social media users a decade earlier. While Jonah Berger’s research in Contagious: Why Things Catch On indicates that face-to-face word-of-mouth is more effective than social media word-of-mouth, social media is not an insignificant contributor to word-of-mouth “buzz.”

What I want to do in this piece is highlight nine diverse word-of-mouth campaigns....