December 11th, 2023, Lesley Simeon
A recent YouGov survey asked consumers across 17 international markets the very same question - how helpful they think word-of-mouth is when buying products across different categories.
Our other pieces focus on categories including cars, healthcare services and airlines. But in this piece, we’re going to look at consumer electronics..
Across the markets we polled, there was an overall tendency to highlight the usefulness of a recommendation or endorsement from family, friends or colleagues. Polling data shows that 15% of consumers across all markets say word-of-mouth helps them a great deal when buying consumer electronics and more than two in five of them (41%) say it helps them a fair amount.
Fewer than a quarter of consumers (24%) say word-of-mouth doesn’t help them very much and under one in ten of them (9%) say it doesn’t help them at all.
We explore YouGov data to see, by market, how useful consumers feel word-of-mouth is when making purchase decisions for consumer electronics.
Over a third of consumers in Hong Kong say word-of-mouth helps them a great amount when buying consumer electronics; 18% of Swedes say it doesn’t help at all
Helps a great deal/a fair amount
We see that consumers in our Asian markets are more likely than those in our European markets to say word-of-mouth helps them a great deal when buying consumers electronics. Hong Kongers lead the pack (34%), followed by Mexicans (33%). The Danes (5%), Britons (7%) and Swedes (7%) are the least likely across all markets to share this opinion.
Along with consumers in Spain (52%), shoppers in Hong Kong (52%) are also most likely across all markets to say word-of-mouth helps them a fair amount when buying consumer electronics. Over a third of Americans (36%) say the same.
Not very much/ not at all
Sweden (38%), Great Britain (33%) and Denmark (33%) log the largest share of consumers across all markets we survey who feel that word-of-mouth doesn’t help them very much when making purchases for consumer electronics. In Asia, Singaporeans are most likely to agree (29%).
As for those who say word-of-mouth is of no help at all when buying consumers electronics, Sweden leads yet again (18%), followed by France (13%), the US (12%), Great Britain (12%), Canada (12%) and Denmark (12%).
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Methodology: YouGov Surveys: Serviced provide quick survey results from nationally representative or targeted audiences in multiple markets. The data is based on surveys of adults aged 18+ years in 17 markets with sample sizes varying between 508 and 2001 for each market. All surveys were conducted online in September2023. Data from each market uses a nationally representative sample apart from Mexico and India, which use urban representative samples, and Indonesia and Hong Kong, which use online representative samples. Learn more about YouGov Surveys: Serviced.
Photo by Iliya Jokic on Unsplash