"the glamour of paid advertising is a total illusion"

Not quite. What appeals about paid marketing is very simple: definable, scalable success.

"word of mouth generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising in categories as diverse as skincare and mobile phones."

While I cannot attest to this being true or false, I can say that word of paid marketing can have a very appealing success rate.

For example, after 5 years of marketing online with my own money I can say the following:

1. 73% of all campaigns failed

2. 22% of all campaigns that did not fail became a moderately profitable success (~50-100% ROI)

3. 5% of all campaigns became absolute smash hits, earning over their lifetimes well past many times the investment I made to find them.

(NOTE: ROI for this example means the amount invested to test & optimize the campaign at the start ($1k-$10k) as opposed to the actual ROI of earnings over time, which is entirely different)

With a 5% smash hit rate - and a 27% success rate, that is a pretty damn good risk factor. This isn't to say that word of mouth doesn't work - it most certainly does - but paid advertising definitely has its place.

If you've got your wits about you, use paid to jump start word of mouth, and capitalize on word of mouth with paid. There is a myriad of opportunity and I would not leave either one out of the mix.

Total fluff piece. Word of mouth marketing? Just sounds like PR to me. And yes, depending on your product, it helps to have a personality behind it—that's just called having a brand.

Could sum this up with Steve Martin's quote from the Charlie Rose show:

    Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it's not
    the answer they wanted to hear. What they want to hear 
    is "Here's how you get an agent, here's how you write 
    a script,"... but I always say,

    "Be so good they can't ignore you."

A lot of the ideas come from - http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1451686579