Come on! Why do you deny the product before you give a try? The answer is online reviews! Considerable factors act on customer's purchase decision and evaluation from existing customers is the most powerful one.
Then where do most customers gather evaluations nowadays? Absolutely Internet!
According to the result of Local Consumer Review Survey, which conducted during January to March in 2012 and gathered 2,862 responses, "approximately 72% of consumers surveyed said that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations."
Why online reviews speak so loud?
Firstly, online reviews are convincing. Most reviews are written and dispersed by existing or past customers, who have the best persuasion to the new customers.
Secondly, online reviews are neutral. Most customers will give an objective evaluation on specific product according to his/her using experience. In addition, online reviews are written by reviewers voluntarily and do not involve profit between reviewers and readers so that they are neutral and objective.
Thirdly, online reviews do not cost and can be written easily and disperse easily. It doesn't cost money for readers to read nor much time for reviewers to edit. Due to the online reviews depend on the Internet, it can be browsed freely and widely.
To these aspects, vendors should take advantage of utilizing the online reviews. I trust that's why so many vendors' official websites have the category of "Best Sellers".
However, how about the vendors who suffer the disadvantages of online reviews?That is the case Pampers Dry Max faced in the "Attack of the Customers: The Pampers Dry Max Crisis" article.
We can see this case as a successful crisis public relation management. Receiving test from authorized third party (CPSC), inviting leading professions to educate customers (pediatricians), gathering dispassionate opinion leaders and concentrating on the problematic product feedback, Pampers Dry Max did a reasonable crisis PR management after the crisis happened.
But from a marketer's point, can Pampers Dry Max do better and lose less? Probably. I trust the answer can be sought in the social media.
The outrage was stoked by Facebook. P&G's representatives might receive thousands of complain calls everyday but they should pay more attention once the complain occurs in the Internet, especially on the social medias. The unsatisfied and confused Pampers Dry Max customers gathered in the Facebook, which flood the page full of complains and reasonless conclusions . That is a big mess. What if P&G team assigned one representative or leading pediatrician on its Facebook page to solve those just started confusions and complains? Will it upgrade to the conflicts happened later? Will the assumption I described at the very beginning of this post happen to the potential customers who are not clear of the truth?
As online reviews contribute more to people's purchase decisions, vendors must pay more attention to their customer reviews to either take advantages of them or avoid unfavorable influence.
Article: "Attack of the Customers: The Pampers Dry Max Crisis" by Paul.
Link: http://gillin.com/blog/2012/08/attack-of-the-customers-the-pampers-dry-max-crisis/
Interesting analysis about customers' comments! Comments have big influences on customer decisions, and as a result, we can't deny that a lot of companies tried to make some fake comments pretending they were customers. We, as customers, could make decision based on comments, but not totally rely on them. As marketers, we could look at this a new way to advertise our product secretly.
ReplyDeleteI actually sometimes doubt about the comments on the internet. From my previous experience, some of the comments are made by people who even hasn't bought the product, not mention whether they had used it or not. In addition, because the increase of social media, not only customers use the nettools, but also all the companies utilize those tools, which may cause unfair competition - some of the competitors may pretend to be customers to attack other companies' products. These situation should also be taken into account by the customers as well as the company.
ReplyDeleteHi Iris,
ReplyDeleteGreat Analysis on customer reviews. I like it.
About interacting with angry customers by social media I have a different opinion with you. As Paul said in his article, P&G vice president of North America baby care Allen was banned from the Facebook group. Allen tried to explain and communicate with these angry customers, but failed. I believe that Allen's position is high enough to represent the company. But people wouldn't accept her. The truth said, interacting with customers on social media after bad things happened is too late. On social media network, people are easy influenced by friends and families but not companies. People got annoyed by commercials on their page already, not talking about explanations posted on their page from business after their babies got sick. I believe that early investments on social media is quite necessary. Companies can build their own pages to communicate with customers, where companies can control the direction of discussions, help customers with their concerns and build brand image.
Right, it is always too late for companies to stay good once accident happens. Besides building own pages to communicate with customers as you mentioned, I think respond as quickly as possible is necessary as well. I remember the article mentioned that Allen was not enough sincerely and seriously of the issue at the start. Pampers didn't start to develop a series activities, including third party test, customer education and customer representatives discussion, until Allen was banned. How about Pampers do these earlier?
DeleteAnyway, thanks for replying and discussion, which provides me new thought :-)