Brand + Reputation

In case you've been living under a rock, the big buzzword in the marketing world this year is WOMM (word of mouth marketing), which emphasizes the value of a brand's reputation rather than a prefabricated image sold through advertising.

Boiled down to its basics, WOMM targets the customer's experience rather than the brand's message. Those experiences range from their opinion of the products themselves, to how friendly (or not) the person who answers the phone at your company's headquarters is. It argues that through WOM, a brand's reputation can be made or unmade, because people trust WOM more than they do advertising and traditional marketing.