As businesses have developed so has marketing, new tools have been developed to aid the marketers task and offer new options for promoting a product or service. Marketers have made use of Television, Radio and Print mediums and with the introduction of the internet they have had a number of new ways to market products and services.
Online marketing tools include banner ads, pop-ups and direct marketing via email, instead of expensive and timely postal services. However the earliest form of marketing communications is word-of-mouth (WOM), the discussion of products and services between individuals who had purchased them or who were considering making a purchase. Consumers promoting products directly to consumers has long been seen as the most effective form of marketing and it maintains this status today. Stamford (2009) states that 'despite the worst recession in decades, brands increased spending on word-of-mouth marketing 14.2% to $1.54 billion in 2008' and although this reduced for 2009, word-of-mouth was still one of the fastest growing advertising and marketing segments.
However in today's rapidly changing world there are still new marketing techniques being developed and since 2007, PQ Media have defined the structure of word-of-mouth, as a marketing segment to include online communication as well as offline (Stamford, 2009). This has come as a result of the internet providing a global communication tool meaning that word-of-mouth is now accompanied by electronic word-of-mouth or EWOM, which although similar in many respects also poses a number of new challenges for marketing managers (Max and Mace, 2008). This is primarily due to the global nature of the internet and the speed at which a single comment regarding an organisation or its product can be instantly received by millions and remain in circulation indefinitely.
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