We wanted to find out for ourselves the importance customer loyalty and WOM has, specific to Australia.

By doing this we could find out how Australian brands performed relative to their domestic competitors and to their American counterparts. We wanted to find out which marketing medium could break through the clutter in this day and age and which marketing medium had the greatest influence on consumer decision making.

It was also important for us to uncover the business or economic impact of product conversations, such as how many positive and negative comments consumers make about their brands. We especially wanted to determine the degree of influence positive and negative brand comments have on consumer purchase decisions.

In sum, we wanted to know whether there was potential for Australian organisations to grow via WOM.

And the good news is that there is massive potential.

A number of our key findings confirm that WOM is integral for organisational growth:

• 45% of consumers said that WOM was the greatest influence on their purchasing decisions in comparison to other marketing mediums.
• Consumers make a varying number of positive and negative comments across different industries but one thing holds constant – if consumers hear just one negative comment about a brand on average it takes 4-5 positive comments from other people before they’ll consider that brand again. Australian brands clearly have room for improvement as they lagged behind their US counterparts (where comparable).

Based on these findings it’s easy to see that Australian brands have a huge opportunity to grow by better leveraging word of mouth.

There are reports on Banking, Cars, Property Insurance and Motor Insurance.

The reports cover the following topics:

• Which marketing channels have the greatest influence on purchasing decisions

• NPS scores by brand

• Customers reasons for their recommend score

– NEW Word of Mouth insights including the following:

• Number of positive comments consumers make about their own brand

• Number of negative comments consumers make about their own brands

• Number of positive comments needed to neutralise a single negative comment

UPDATE: Engaged Strategy’s most recent benchmarking results are available here.