By Chris Clark- Co Founder, The Senior List (http:www.theseniorlist.com)There are customer review sites for just about everything these days, and my guess is that when making your last important purchase decision, you knowingly (or perhaps unknowingly) utilized a peer-review when researching online. Earlier this year I was shopping for a new laptop, with a very open mind regarding brand, memory, screen size, etc. What I found (to my dismay) was that there is a plethora of information out there at your fingertips, much of it provided by the manufacturers themselves. For example, if you visit Dell.com you’ll find that each new laptop model they sell has customer reviews associated with it… good, bad or indifferent.
Why would an industry behemoth like Dell be interested in providing a forum for customers to gripe about how lousy the battery life is in the Inspiron 13 laptop? Because today, businesses are building brand loyalty based on a new pillar of trust and transparency. For the Dell shoppers the sub-conscience processes the following thought wave in the deep recesses of the brain:
If Dell is willing to let me see direct customer feedback, they’re clearly interested in me as a consumer, and clearly interested in improving their performance as well. They are connected, and I trust that… Perhaps I should look more closely at buying from Dell…
In many cases, positive customer reviews directly influence the purchase decisions made by consumers on a daily basis. In a 2007 Jupiter Research/Bazaarvoice survey over two-thirds (70%) of UK online users rated online product ratings and reviews the most helpful feature when researching product purchases. Perhaps more important, 97% were willing to trust online reviews. These statistics are likely even higher among the ever burgeoning baby boomer demographic. ThirdAge, a boomer focused (content rich) site indicates that 96% of boomers participate in word-of-mouth or viral marketing by passing product or service information along to friends. Everybody knows that word of mouth advertising is the most cost-effective advertising on the planet…well, word of mouth has a new mouth… it’s called the internet.
How can your business take advantage of this new age in marketing/advertising? A number of things come to mind: First,
embrace this new consumer revolution. If you don’t, you’re doomed to fail (or at least fall behind). Second,
monitor your online presence. I constantly speak to business owners that google their business name, and key products (daily) to see who’s writing about them, and where they’re showing up in search results (I’ll discuss enhancing your natural search engine results in another article/post). Third,
don’t be afraid of a bad review- learn from it. Nobody is perfect, not in our personal lives and not in business. When I see a business or product with 100% of their reviews as positive, I genuinely wonder if there’s a pig under that blanket. Businesses can (and should) encourage their satisfied customers to post a review on an appropriate site. This will offset the occasional disgruntled consumer posting.
Customer review sites aren’t going away anytime soon, in fact they’re likely to propagate. We’re in the midst of a consumer revolution, and this revolution is taking place online.
Embrace it, participate in it, and enjoy the ride. Take a peak at what the larger consumer product companies in the world are doing. Dell isn’t running from this revolution, they’re knee deep in it. They know that by connecting with you and gaining your trust, they'll have a shot the next time you're in the market for a quality PC. Oh and as for my laptop purchase? I ended up going with an HP… they also have consumer reviews for every model :) My battery life stinks, and the fan is too loud… but I guess I should have known that- eh?
Chris Clark co-founded The Senior List, a consumer-opinion site focused on senior-services. His career also includes over 18 years spent in corporate healthcare sales and marketing.
By Chris Clark
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