Spoken or Written recommendation? What is more effective?

Are you looking to increase the number of patients seeking your services? Many of them look for recommendations on review pages or rely on advice from their close friends and family. The question is, what’s more effective in influencing their decisions? According to a report from Harvard Business Review (HBR), it turns out that people are more likely to act on recommendations they hear rather than those they read, even when the wording is identical. Through a series of five experiments, researchers discovered that individuals who received recommendations via human or computerized voices were more inclined to take action based on those suggestions than those who read them.

Why is this the case? Research has shown that the ephemerality of auditory messages creates a sense of relative urgency. This sense of urgency prompts a need for closure, leading to a quicker reliance on early cues. Thus, we advise keep up the high-level quality of your medical services and focus more on spoken recommendations in your marketing strategies.

*About the research: Mariadassou, S., Bechler, C. J., & Levav, J. (2023). The Effect of Auditory and Visual Recommendations on Choice. Psychological Science34(1), 47-59.

 

Scroll to Top