I can't catch the exact meaning of this sentence,even if the author had made it understood.hope you help with

Question

It goes like this
"they have become,through marketing,word of mouth,and demonstrable reliability,the common pants of America."
Do you think the author made the sentence clear?How can I understand the phrase of "word of mouth"?Word of whose mouth?Does it refer to the advertisment or the public judgement?

Answer 1

Gone Car: The above 3 answers are correct and are all very good answers. What is causing your confusion here is that the phrase "word of mouth" is what is known as an idiomatic expression which means that it is peculiar to a given language, in this case English, and cannot usually be translated word for word in another language without distorting the meaning or causing confusion. For your purpose here the phrase could be translated (in non-idiomatic English) as "spread by spoken communication among a group of people." That may make it clearer to you, but you can see that it's a mouthful (another idiom, I mean "a lot") to say which I guess is why we invent idiomatic expressions like "word of mouth." English has many many idiomatic expressions which must make it very difficult for foreigners trying to learn the language. For us speaking English since birth these idiomatic expressions just come naturally since we've always used them. Just like the peculiarities of Chinese come naturally to you. Can you think of some Chinese, expressions which can't be translated word for word into English? Those would be Chinese idioms.

Answer 2

Word-of-mouth is often the most powerful marketing tool. Word-of-mouth is basically another way of saying 'verbal referral". If you think back to your own experience, you're more likely to opt for a certain product or service if you have received positive feedback from someone close to you in relation to that product or service.

Answer 3

"word of mouth" means the general public talking about something and basically promoting it by telling their friends how cool it is. And those friends tell more friends, and so on and so forth until everyone knows about it.

Answer 4

It is kind of like yahoo answers. we tell our friends they try it out they tell their friends they try it out and so on and so on. Yahoo advertises on the Internet TV and radio so you check it out and tell your friends and so on.