Face-to-Face Tops Social As W-O-M Vehicle

Both Millennials and Gen Xers say they’re more likely to spread the word about their favorite brands and products face-to-face than via social media, according to results from a CrowdTwist study. Beyond those two leading word-of-mouth vehicles, though, email proves more popular among Gen Xers while texting is more apt to be used by Millennials.

The results are from a survey of 1,208 North American consumers ages 18-69, from which subsets of 403 Gen X consumers (born between 1965 and 1980) and 402 Millennials (born between 1981 and 1997) were examined in separately-released reports. (The report examining Boomers has yet to be released; presumably, face-to-face will also be a more popular W-O-M vehicle than social media among this group of respondents.)

Millennials (50.5%) and Gen Xers (49.6%) were equally as likely to say they are extremely loyal or quite loyal to their favorite brands. Of these two sets of respondents, though, Millennials appear to be the group more likely to switch brands.

With consumers increasingly modifying their shopping habits due to loyalty programs, preventing churn is paramount for those marketers using a loyalty or reward program. For both cohorts, the top reasons given for abandoning a loyalty program were:

  • The rewards not being compelling or relevant;
  • Being tired of waiting for points to accumulate; and
  • Not having enough ways to earn points.

When it comes to earning those points through non-purchase activities, answering a survey is easily the favorite method for Gen Xers (78.2%) and Millennials (74.4%).  Of note, among the various activities listed, checking-in at a location ranked higher for Gen Xers than Millennials, while the opposite was true for watching videos.

Finally, discounts/coupons and cash back/credit were the most important benefits (in that order) for both generations. While brand experiences ranked as one of the less important benefits, these were cited by significantly more Millennials (11%) than Gen Xers (1.7%).

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