The power of recommendation in China
Rating: recommended reading
By Annie Turner
Shanghai-based Jan van der Bergh, president of i-merge/boondoggle, has made public the results of the online survey his company and Sinomonitor jointly undertook to explore the power of brand and recommendation on the Internet. You can read more stats at Ogilvy’s Digital Watch site, from where you can also download a pdf of the whole report.
The bit I like best is that Mr van der B writes, “marketers in China continue to underestimate the power of customer recommendation and overestimate the power of advertising [in] old media…evangelists, influencers, advocates seem to become the real driving force behind big brands. In reality ‘human media’ dwarf what we usually call ‘media’.”
Yeah. Too right – and these suppositions are not confined to China nor online activity. Recommendation is largely what personalisation really means on mobile rather than the guff that is so often talked about concerning advertising on mobile, such as to justify sending people unsolicited SMSs, based on demographic information.
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