MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Deriving Value From Conversations About Your Brand

Research shows that both online and off-line customer conversations drive purchase decisions — but they require separate marketing strategies.

Divergent conversations about brands are fairly common — and not only for brands that get caught up in controversies. Indeed, we studied more than 500 leading consumer brands and found that in most cases there was little correlation between what consumers said about the brands online and what they said off-line, even though both streams of conversation can have big effects on a company’s sales.