• Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Wednesday, December 26, 2007 12 PM

Word of mouth--sometimes referred to as buzz marketing or viral marketing--was the fastest-growing slice of the $254 billion marketing industry last year, and is expected to account for more than $1 billion of ad spending in 2007, according to a report by PQ Media. That number is forecast to reach $3.7 billion by 2011, fueled in part by the eruption of blogs and the increasing popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook.

As long as there have been brands, people have talked about them--both positively and negatively--but it is only in the past few years that a diverse range of marketers, from drug companies such as GlaxoSmithKline to clothing manufacturers such as Lee Jeans, have begun to make it a regular staple of their brand strategies. For one thing, it is relatively cheap. More important, it is trusted.

"It totally outweighs all the other forms of advertising and marketing direct in terms of trust," says Leo Kivijarv, vice president of research for PQ Media. But Jack Trout, president of marketing and research firm Trout & Partners, says WOM is "overhyped" and furnishes a pair of recent high-profile flops to illustrate his skepticism: Pontiac's decision to give away its new G6 model on "Oprah" and "Snakes on a Plane," the Samuel L. Jackson thriller.

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