Nielsen: "Believability is key in advertising effectiveness"

“Believability is key in advertising effectiveness”

That is how the report from Nielsen starts (link to PDF here)

• they have globally examined consumer confidence and susceptibility to take action on various media and messages.

We really recommend this report and want to especially highlight something we think is very interesting. The two forms of marketing that consumers find the most credible and take action from is recommendations from people I know followed by consumer opinions on the Internet. It is one of the main reasons why different brands offers test pilots to experience their products through sharevertising!

Recommendations between consumers

Sharevertising can help you create word of mouth conversations and honest ambassadors of your brand. We report from each campaign how many consumers each test pilot has spoken to, so-called word of mouth (VoM).

From the study “love and buy”, which is carried out three months after the campaign, we have seen the following when it comes to brand ambassadors for groceries.

If you have engaged thousands of consumers to apply, and the test pilots feel special and spend a significant time on the product, they share their experiences with family and friends and talk about the product - then it makes sense that they will continue to talk about the product even after the test. We believe that genuine ambassadors will always be better than the bought ones, such as bloggers, celebrities or sports stars (Nielsen talks about sponsored celebrities and they are far down the list of credibility).

We believe consumers and that they can see through when something is bought/forced compared to when a recommendation is genuine and deserved. In addition, it eliminates the risk of celebrities making a fool of themselves (we're thinking of Peter Northug for Coop, Tiger Woods and Gilette and Mia Skäringer for Proviva) by spreading it out on thousands of ordinary people.

Consumer opinions

We always present the consumers opinions, both good and bad ones, which gives credibility to the overall performance and the recommendation factor. For those large purchases, you want to know what might not be so great and if it's something that will affect me. All the posts by the test pilots are reached on the blog for full transparency.