Real-world or real-life? What does it mean for recommendations?
The press release for a study by Mintel, a world-wide market research firm, states that “people still prefer real-life recommendations to online“. The study was intended to test the idea that real-world referrals are still more important than those received online. Mintel’s results show that only 5% of people buy based on suggestions from bloggers or chatrooms, while over 5 times as many buy on recommendations from friends, relatives, and spouses or partners.
I don’t have any problems with the basic findings of the study. But equating real-world with real-life leads to an incorrect conclusion that recommendations online are inherently less effective than those made offline.
What’s important is the strength of the connection, regardless of how the connection is made. I have friends and associates online that I have never met, but whose opinions I trust. Maybe I don’t know them well enough to invite them to dinner, or to ask them to dogsit, but I know enough about them to value their suggestions about a piece of software, an LCD projector, or a training class. The same is true of consumer purchases. I’ll treat an anonymous review of a refrigerator with caution; perhaps it will highlight some feature that I didn’t think of, or give me a reason to double check some aspect. But if I know more about the person and their use of the product I have more confidence in the review’s relevance for me. And if is from someone that I’ve become acquainted with, I will be even more likely to pay attention to the recommendation.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that online connections are a replacement for real-world friendships. But there is room for both, and either one may be valuable for recommendations. So companies needn’t despair that their efforts in social media won’t pay off. Perhaps the net effect of suggestions online is lower, but I suspect that for with strong connections the results will be a lot closer than the 5:1 ratio you might assume from the Mintel report.
Idiosyncratically.
Mike Pritchard
