Organized word-of-mouth marketing campaigns are driven by product boosters who extol a product to friends and acquaintances. A study found that these campaigns are more successful when the product booster openly admits to being part of an organized marketing campaign. This is surprising because one of the purported advantages of word-of-mouth campaigns is that consumers take a less skeptical stance toward word-of-mouth messages than toward mass-media advertisements.
Word-of-mouth campaigns are more successful when product boosters are open about their involvement in the marketing campaign, even though it seems like such openness might undermine a supposed advantage of word-of-mouth campaigns: that consumers tend to be less skeptical of this strategy than they are of mass-media advertisements.
The right answer will give us some reason why consumers react more positively to word-of-mouth product boosters who admit that they are part of a marketing campaign. This benefit will help us understand why product boosters who are open about their affiliation are more successful, even though it may seem like this strategy would make them less trustworthy and thereby undermine a typical advantage of word-of-mouth campaigns.
Which one of the following, if true, most helps to explain the surprising finding?
Word-of-mouth marketing campaigns are generally used for specialty products that are not well suited to being marketed through mass-media advertisements.
The type of product being marketed doesn’t matter for our purposes. We’re interested in the general advantages of a particular marketing strategy rather than information about what type of products are being sold via said strategy.
Those who tend to be the most receptive to mass-media marketing campaigns are also the least likely to be influenced by knowledge of a product booster's affiliation.
This doesn’t help us. We need to know why knowledge of a product booster’s affiliation makes campaigns more successful on aggregate, not information about a particular subset of consumers and the likelihood that they’ll be influenced by this strategy.
Most people who work as product boosters in word-of-mouth marketing campaigns have themselves been recruited through a word-of-mouth process.
This tells us nothing about product boosters who admit their affiliation or why they tend to be more successful than those who do not.
Most word-of-mouth marketing campaigns cost far less than marketing campaigns that rely on mass-media advertisements.
We don’t need to compare word-of-mouth marketing campaigns to mass-media advertisements, we need to know about word-of-mouth campaigns wherein product boosters acknowledge their affiliation vs. those in which they don’t. We also aren’t interested in costs, just effectiveness.
When a word-of-mouth product booster admits his or her affiliation, it fosters a more relaxed and in-depth discussion of the marketed product.
This helps explain why product boosters who admit their affiliation are more successful: their admission leads to more relaxed, in-depth discussion, which likely reduces skepticism and thereby enhances a purported advantage of word-of-mouth campaigns rather than undermining it.
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