Archive for the ‘WOM’ Category

The UK's favourite retailer, Marks & Spencer, has garnered a lot of media attention recently following its decision to raise the price large bras by £2. The media I refer to is of course not only the tabloids, but social media and those vocal customers versed in using it to rally the crowds. Perhaps the best example of the groundswell is a Facebook group called Busts4Justice which as of today stood with over 17,000 members!

An organisation the nature of M&S - large, customer-facing, national/international - clearly had a business case to support their action, however, their reputation took a dive not only because of the decision they took, but the lack of engagement and consultation that took place ahead of making the decision and presenting the price hike to the public.

Social media allows consumers with a shared passion or common interest - in this instance large breasts - to hyper-connect and create unilateral campaigns that have been known to have an immense negative impact on reputation, brand trust and loyalty. Turn social media on it's head and it presents the perfect medium with which brands can engage in conversation and discussion with consumers, be it in an public or private environment.

As a business that helps and advises brands how to use social media to engage with consumers and staff, we take much from a story like this. The lessons to learn include:

Trigger the conversation, don't wait for it to happen - Before the announcement were made, but at the time of it being discussed internally, locate consumer that are already having conversations around this topic or subject, and invite them into a private conversation. These people will by their very nature be the most vocal and passionate since they are already sharing their views and opinions in the public domain. Knowing where to find them can take time and expertise, but the chances are there will be a public forum somewhere out there where they are already active.

Listen carefully - Once you've triggered a discussion, pay attention carefully and listen to the views and opinions of your customers. Use three ears to do it if necessary! Researchers and moderators have the necessary skills to do this as well as interpreting the information being shared, so consider using them.

Empathise - As the issue or decision is made public, continue to listen and acknowledge points that are being raised. Your Community Manager(s) should provide the voice of your brand at this stage.

Reward - Acknowledgement and involvement with the decision-making process are forms of reward, but there are many others. Loyalty schemes and price promotions are other forms that cab used (within retail businesses), whereby you nurture the customer relationships you have by offering them discounts on other associated products (in the case of M&S where the hike was publicised, for example).

The result of M&S not following some of these recommendations resulted in a very public u-turn, which despite giving customers their requests, left M&S bruised and with a new layer of distrust.

• 76% of people don't believe that companies tell the truth in advertisements (Yankelovich, 2005)
• In the 1970's the average person was exposed to between 500-2,000 ad messages. Now it's 3,000-5,000 (USA Today)
• In 2005, MTV viewers were exposed to 21% more prime-time commercials per hour than in 2004 (Mindshare)

In this weekend's national newspapers broke a story of how The Southbank Centre, one of London's leading cultural centres, attempted to fool theatre goers into believing two false reviews which quickly followed poor reviews to the new Wizard of Oz production. A beady-eyed moderator had noticed that three comments in quick succession had come from the same IP address! When exposed, the Southbank Centre owned-up to the attempt to manipulate public opinion, and are being investigated further.

It's been well documented, and learnt by many, that participation in web2.0 requires openness and honesty, and this case illustrates the point well. The general public are now well versed in spotting a fake, be it by their tone of voice, or in this case, by identifying repeated IP addresses.

What the Southbank Centre should have done was to 'listen' to the general public with open ears,

ExpoTV, the people that bring you videopinions - short unbiased consumer-made videos about their experiences with products, service and brands, have published a new study which shows that 55% of consumers want an ongoing dialogue with brands. The survey, which explores how direct consumer engagement creates brand advocacy, reveals that positive brand experiences can generate word-of-mouth buzz. More than 60% of those questioned said they would tell 10 or more people about the products they like, with a third telling more than 20 people.

Consumers' growing desire to share their experiences - good AND bad - with other consumers, and their appetite to converse directly with brands is growing, fast! This bodes well for Dub, as we work to bring position brands and consumers side-by-side, and turn these online conversations into meaningful, valuable transactions - innovation, advocacy and new relationships.

Time and again, Lego has been used as the benchmark in this area, through their development of the Mindstorm with their community of passionate collectors and budding engineers. From this new study, we see that nearly 50% stated that they would be interested in knowing what new products are coming out, and expressed a designer to share new ideas on new products and services.

The benefits to a brand of hosting an online community, and taking an active role in activities and discussions, is evident, and not just confined to research and marketing departments, but business-wide as it seeks to become truly consumer centric in its decision-making process.

Couple the willingness of the consumer to talk, with some easy-to-use tools, an ear or two, and an openness to share information and your brand will thrive.

A great article has appeared in MyCustomer.com here, written by Jennifer Kirby.

Bottom line, Jennifer establishes that staff are expensive; technology less so. Many organisations are starting to realise the benefits of driving customer transactions to self-service and self-help forums. That means your front line staff can be released to deliver customer insight into the heart of the organisation, and by involving them in this way the level of both innovation and customer solutions should increase sales through service.

Of most interest is that fact that supposedly between 40 and 90% of staff time is now wasted on unproductive tasks, and how such divergent operations as a retailer - in this case John Lewis - and local council - Haringey - are using similar tools and relationship management techniques to achieve success in making them consumer-centric.

Dub has long believed in workplace innovation, a form of closed open innovation if you like, but it's potential also to harvest new collaborative networks and end-user relationships is vast.

At Dub we've been deliberating for some time now how to measure advocacy - call it a marketers predisposition! It seems others are asking the same question. Matt Rhodes over at FreshNetworks has posted an interesting viewpoint gathered from a session with Kingston University's Professor of Consumer Behaviour, Robert East.

Matt explains the five principals to bear in mind when trying to measure WOM as:

1. Don't confuse word of mouth with satisfaction - only a small proportion of word of mouth is prompted by a satisfactory or dissatisfactory experience

2. Measuring word of mouth by the likelihood to talk (positively or negatively) about a brand misses the critical element - the impact the word of mouth has. A better measure is based around how people act when they receive word of mouth (positive or negative) - how this changes their propensity to purchase

3. Anybody can be an advocate and pass on positive word of mouth. It's more important to activate the whole user base than to try to find a particularly segment of advocates

4. The world is just more positive than negative - that's the way people think about things. So you should expect more positive word of mouth than negative

5. One size doesn't fit all - people are just more likely to talk about some products than others. Recommendations are more important for a dentist than they are for a supermarket. So you can only compare brands at the category level; indeed a different measurement tool may be needed by category

For those organisations out there considering the fit of Open Innovation with their overarching business objectives, it's worth paying attention to the ambitions and achievements of OI leader, P&G.

P&G has set itself the mammoth task of getting 50% of it's new ideas from external resources, be they partner organisations, consumers or specialist think-tanks. When they first embarked upon this program, estimated to be back in 2004, P&G employed around 7,500 in-house researchers, but estimated that there were around 1.5 million researchers with the right skills worldwide that they could tap into.

Come 2006, they reckoned they still had 7,500 researchers sitting inside the business, but that they also drew on 2,000 researchers externally. To support the flow of new ideas, P&G release all their patents five years after being lodged or three years after a product is released to the market.

What P&G is also doing to great effect is placing greater emphasis on the consumer experience by involving consumers at the heart of the innovation process. How are they doing this? The answer lies in consumer communities such as beinggirl.com, Capessa and their Tremor initiative. These vibrant communities consisting of brand advocates and those willing to share their experiences provide great flows of insight upon which new ideas can be focussed an tested.

At Dub we help build and support such communities using our proprietary software platform and our Research and Community Management skills. Businesses wishing to observe consumers interactions and conversations around specific products or categories can also benefit from new digital tools that can help firmly plant new consumer insights at the heart of every department. Your community doesn't have to be the size of P&G's, but by developing a community as small and easy-to-manage as between 300-500, you'll witness some quick, cost effective results.

Technorati Tags: crowdsourcing, engagment, P&G, research2.0

Hot news: Starbucks has gone all Open Innovation on us. Not quite, but it's not a bad first attempt.

Following the success of Dell's IdeaStorm, Starbucks has launched its very own open innovation platform called MyStarbucksIdeas, using Salesforces formidable software. Coffee sales are truly dwindling, so to combat this Starbucks has launched the service which gives customers the opportunity to logon and give them new ideas on how to improve their products, services and business operation.

The site (platform) is well designed though it would benefit from displaying the most rated ideas on the home page. Interface design aside, the thing that most disappoints me is how Starbucks appear to have forgotten to say thank you to participants for their great ideas by giving them a reward of sorts. I took the time to read through their terms and conditions, and here's what I found:

The submission of your Idea to Starbucks is entirely voluntary, non-confidential, gratuitous, and non-committal. You understand that Starbucks may be working on the same or a similar Idea, that it may already know of such Idea from other sources, that it may simply wish to develop this (or a similar Idea) on its own or it may have taken/will take some other action.

So much for two-way dialogue, this feels like one-way traffic to me. I for one will be watching the progress of this platform with interest, not least because I think my idea that they should offer more coffee in smaller cups (figure that) is genius!

Tesla, is a Silicon Valley-based car company. They're currently developing a high performance electric-powered car. To achieve this, they have adopted many of the progressive techniques developed by their digitally obsessed neighbors. (more...)

I've just finished reading The Age of Conversation. The book's part crowdsourcing - the Editors set a topic and put it out to the writing community. And part co-creation - the Editors worked with these writers to polish the product. (more...)