My Reply:
You can read many things that do not tell the whole story. I know many business owners personally, with plenty of competition, who have very successful businesses that do no advertising whatsoever. Their business comes from referrals. Referrals are word of mouth.
In every town in America, there is very likely a restaurant that does great business, and their only advertising is a book of matches they give away with their logo on it.
Their business comes from people telling other people that the place is a great place to eat.
Word of Mouth advertising is also what makes a restaurant go broke - no matter how much traditional advertising they are buying.
Mr C
I received this comment from a reader on a post I did April 22, 2006. I'm amazed that someone would be read that old of a post and reply to it. The topic is still very relevant these five years later. Below is the reader comment:
I read in an article somewhere that the Return on Investment for word of mouth marketing is only about 2%, while traditional advertising had a 20% ROI rate. In my opinion, word of mouth works great when you have a really important cause that can pertain to almost every person out there. But if you're company's cause is just as interesting as every other fish in the business sea, traditional marketing is probably where you wanna go.