As you already know the best communication campaign on earth will not help a product with a bad distribution. Vice versa an optimal distribution will not help a product which does not meet consumers need. So any company needs engineers from one side to create a viable product and commercial team from the other side to make it available. Marketing team studies the market and create the claim that shall make people need and buy the product. This system is clear and has been working for years.
On a static market where a constant demand meets a constant supply, where competitors, pressure are constant as well as consumer’s satisfaction, no company has to worry about evolution. Unfortunately real life is way different: Demand is evolving every single day, making products and brands appear and disappear (who is buying Walkmans today? / Have you already purchased a Kindle or an iPad yet?), Distribution channels are appearing or disappearing (Buy food products on Internet ), competitors pressure is higher days after days (Remember when Nokia was the first mobile phone in Europe with almost 50% market share. Today Apple is number 2 constructor in France, Nokia being the 3rd…), and finally consumers have more possibilities than ever to embrace or boycott products and brands (bad buzz about Dominio’s pizza in the US / Lifelock getting bankrupt because of a video on Youtube / high affinity brands like smoothies Innocent…).
So the challenge for companies’ survival lays in their capacities to evolve and adapt their production to more and more demanding consumers or to innovate by creating new needs. (again Kindle, iPad but also Red Bull energy shot, anti-cholesterol yogurt Danacor…). Easy you will say for major companies with huge R&D budget, who can afford to spend millions in test, research, focus group, surveys… But what are the possibilities for companies without R&D budgets?
A smart use of social media can provide any companies with most of the insight they need to adapt and make their product evolve to meet consumers’ needs. The followings are few examples of how to gather information about a company’s product or market, test novelties and generate ideas about new products / products enhancement:
- Internet Monitoring. Internet is a sum of conversations, news feeds, articles, rich media content. Hundreds of million people are exchanging information on a daily bases so for sure a company can not find out what is said about its brand or products by itself. Fortunately they don’t have to. A few very good tools are available for that, and some are even free.
Google alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts ) is one of them as well as Yandex Metrica (http://metrika.yandex.ru/) for Runet, Tweet Scan (http://www.tweetscan.com/ ) for twitter or even How Sociable (http://www.howsociable.com/ ) for social media, that by the way are not taken into account by search engines. This tools will already provide with valuable information about what people are saying about a brand and how popular it is. For more precise research and analytics, tools like Radian 6 (http://www.radian6.com/) or Vanksen Watch (http://www.vanksen.fr/monitoring.php ) offers additional possibilities to track conversations, measure a brand “buzzability” and determine where conversations are taking place.
By monitoring a brand/product/dedicated market, companies have access to consumers and users conversations and doing so getting valuable feedback about how people like, use, understand and replace a product. When people don’t know they are monitored, they are always more objective and franc than when they know they are. Unless you do a lot of them, my opinion is focus groups are pretty useless, as one character always succeed in influencing the rest of the group.
“There are pros and cons with using free tools. The main downfall is a lack of privacy and control over tracked data. Depending on the company, free solutions will more than suffice, but for others, enterprise solutions are a better analytics solution. I recommend revisiting these tools with each new release to ensure you're implementing the most comprehensive analytics plan possible.” Says Nicole Rawski digital media analyst for Geary interactive.
- Brand Blog. By gathering brand fans and market segment focused people on a plateform owned by a company, consumers and users have a place where to discuss and exchange their opinion about a topic. Unlike monitoring approach making surveillance on where the conversations could happen, the brand blog is working as a magnet that invite concerned people to use this specific plateform to provide their feedback. Blogs like Being-a-girl (http://www.beinggirl.com ) from Procter & Gamble or Fiskateers (http://www.fiskateers.com/ ) from Fiskars are very good examples. The first one is dedicated to teenage girls to discuss menstrual problems, the second one is dedicated to woman exerciaing crafting. In both cases products are the necessary accessories of the conversations. By following and monitoring topics of discussions and questions asked, marketers from those company will have a unique possibility to have concrete and constructive consumers’ insight. This insight will help to adapt products and marketing approach for each market as those blogs are operating for different countries. Finally, the users of those plateforms are generally enthousiastic consumers. This way it opens many opportunity to drive opinion polls, sampling and tests of new products and gather feedbacks.
- UGC Blog. A User Generated Content blog can be totally focused on gathering people’s opinion and ideas in order to support a brand development. In another world, the companies’ Research & Development department is out-sourced to… users. From one hand 20 specialists working to find out ideas and possibilities of improvements, from the other hand from few hundreds to few thousands enthousiastics, daily users of the products, which are eager to help with improvement. The best known up to date cases are My Starbucks Idea (http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/ ) and Dell’s Idea Storm (http://www.ideastorm.com/ ) . The idea of those initiatives is to give consumers a voice and to provide their ideas in order to improve the products. Both blogs registered more than 50.000 suggestions; users are then invited to vote for the best ideas. This demand orientated approach will not generate a business model revolution, but it will provide significant and up to date data about what consumers are thinking and what they expect about future products. In 2005, Dell was the victim of a legendary blogger, Jeff Davis, and his post “Dell lies. Dell sucks”. This complain about Dell’s services resonated with thousands of other customers bad experiences. In response to the fast growing bad buzz about the brand, they have launched the Ideastorm blog and encourage customers to contribute to products suggestions. In early 2008, Dell claimed that 27 products and process innovations had come about as a direct result of ideas submitted on the blog, like Linux operating system to replace Micosoft’s windows. Executing customers’ ideas is then a source of business also because the idea instigators will most likely be the first one to acquire a product that they have inspired.
The question I have been asked for once was “how to calculate the return on investment for such approach. The answer is that you simply can’t. It is first about building relationship with consumers and second, if lucky enough, to receive among thousands propositions some great ideas. Most of the feeds are targeting very simple request for example “create a crème-brule Moccacino” on My starbucks Idea. This will not modify Starbucks’ business model, but it will make consumers happy which is after all the reason to be of every company.
Thierry Cellerin,
Consumer’s Engagement Marketing Specialist.
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