A new Nielsen study with consumers from almost 50 countries shows cross-national levels of trust and reliance on different sources of information, including word-of-mouth recommendations.

The following are the top and bottom five countries based on levels of trust in advertising:

Philippines  67%
Brazil  67%
Mexico  66%
South Africa  64%
Taiwan  63%

Latvia 38%
Germany  35%
Lithuania  34%
Italy  32%
Denmark  28%

A Herald Tribune article concludes the following:

The picture is not all doom and gloom for marketers or for media owners reliant on advertising, however. The study showed, for instance, that consumers in developing markets still have relatively high levels of trust in advertising, even if their counterparts in developed countries are more cynical. In the Philippines and Brazil, for instance, 67 percent of consumers said they generally trusted advertising.

This is a quite interesting theory. As a researcher, I would love to have the entire data set available and test whether countries’ level of development (e.g. based on GDP per capita, literacy, etc.) or post-industrialization (e.g. relative size of service vs manufacturing in the economy, Internet connectivity, etc.) correlates with trust in advertising. As my previous post on the role of WOM in China showed, there may be other cultural and economic variables that have to be taken into account.

Tradeoffs between trust in advertising and reliance on WOM are not a zero-sum game. Reliance on recommendations seems to have a strong cultural component, as shown by the following top five countries, all of which are Asian (and commonly considered more collectivist or interdependent in self-orientation):

Hong Kong  93%
Taiwan  91%
Indonesia  89%
India  87%
South Korea  87%

Note that none of the bottom five countries about reliance on recommendations are from the top five ‘trust in advertising’ list:

Hungary  68%
Latvia  68%
Lithuania  64%
Italy  64%
Denmark  62%

On the contrary, four of these (Latvia, Lithuania, Italy, Denmark) actually represent countries with consumers who are most cynical about advertising, perhaps indicating that people there generally have low trust in external sources of information.

Nielsen generated the following global ranking for consumer trust in different sources of information. Not surprisingly, recommendations from consumers and newspapers rank very high, whereas online banner ads and mobile phone text ads are the least trusted:

Recommendations from consumers 78%
Newspapers 63%
Consumer opinions posted online 61%
Brand websites 60%
Television 56%
Magazines 56%
Radio 54%
Brand sponsorships 49%
Email I signed up for 49%
Ads before movies 38%
Search engine ads 34%
Online banner ads 26%
Text ads on mobile phones 18%