When my grandpa buys a product he hates, he has one of two choices:
- Send a hand-written letter to the company asking them for an acceptable compromise.
- Write a letter to Consumer Reports and hope that enough sad saps have been duped into the same crap-tastic purchase.
If I were a betting kind of gal, I’d call my grandpa a losing horse. Thank goodness the WWW has helped make our odds much better.
In today’s marketplace, social issues are instantly globalized with the help of consumer-generated forums, blogs and social networking sites. If you want to put the smack down on a shady product you can write a comprehensive product review at one of the countless consumer-opinion and shopping sites like Epinions. If you want to put HSBC bank in time-out over uncool interest rate hikes, launch a Facebook protest. If you want to beat the passport system fair and square, launch a digital letter-writing campaign to crash your congressman’s system (one of my personal favorites).
So, listen up corporate world, there are literally infinite ways consumers can hunt you down and publicly flog you for shady behavior. So, quit being shady.
We’ve talked about the power of consumer opinion before, but we think it’s time to give you MGH’s top tips on how to clear the air and make friends with the very consumers whose power you revere.
Learn the difference between “consumer reviews” and “testimonials“
Everyone loves a good pat-on-the-back testimonial, but consumers prefer a balanced consumer review from self-selected sources. Recent articles like this one from August’s Wall Street Journal outline what happens when a slightly negative consumer review is rejected by a corporate site that only posts testimonials. Instead of quelling the consumer’s desire to post, the company forced the customer to post to an independent site losing the opportunity to address the product review in a straightforward, non-shady way. Shady business dealings don’t get swept under the rug these days, they get projected faster and more furiously than ever before.
TIP: Make a corporate decision to do one of the following:
- Host all consumer reviews in a constructive, open-minded format on your home site.
- Create a community of active talkers who can provide you with regular online feedback in private to help eliminate some of the brand concerns before they arise.
- Elect not to host testimonials or consumer reviews on your site, but become an active participant on outside consumer review sites making yourself accessible and helpful.
Once you’ve decided, stick to it. Don’t call yourself a consumer review site if you’re not accepting anything but testimonials.
Become accessible
We all know the importance of communicating with our customers, but how much emphasis do we place on telling them something verses listening to what they have to say? Being accessible means more than just pushing out a monthly email newsletter to opt-in recipients.
TIP: Carefully define a list of ways consumers can reach you. Do you provide them with ample communication lines and attentive responses to their concerns and are you active in seeking customer opinions on your site or others? If you’ve answered “no” to all three, you’re at risk of being deemed shady.
In this new consumer-is-king age it might seem there are one million ways for companies and brands to screw up. But there are also one million ways to be respected for your commitment to non-shady, consumer-considerate marketing. MGH can help you find them.
