Moving at the speed of the crowd has become mandatory for any company that is on the web (which is just about every company). These companies must understand how influence gets peddled in the marketplace today (and constantly refresh their understanding) – and they must constantly reevaluate how customers are influenced and what the appropriate response should be. Readers will learn what the responses should be in this article
It’s not easy being a marketer in an age of crowdsourced opinions. A hotel chain, for example, might spend millions of dollars promoting a set of strong and consistent marketing messages—only to find them contradicted on a travel site like TripAdvisor. Or a high-end restaurant accustomed to touting its stellar Zagat ratings could be undermined by lukewarm reviews on crowd-sourced opinion site Yelp.
People have always sought information and advice from those they feel they can trust—friends and family, journalists or film critics, and publications like travel guides or consumer reports. Today, they have many more available sources. These new kinds of digital advisers and opinion aggregators, which compile independent and unfiltered reviews from users and consumers, operate beyond marketers’ control and have significant power to shape consumer opinion, behavior and spending.
This article will describe four approaches marketers can take to trump this new breed of advisers by turning the crowd into their friend.
The new landscape of influence
We have identified ten distinct sources of influence that can sway consumers. (See Figure 1.) Though some have been used for ages, four of the ten have only materialized as potent forces since the advent of Web 2.0. The new sources are enabled by social networks such as Facebook and Pinterest, opinion aggregators like Yelp and Rotten Tomatoes, automated recommendation engines such as those of Netflix and Pandora, and price-comparison services like Priceline and Google Shopping. Further, the six other sources of influence have been enhanced and democratized in the Internet age.
Figure: 1
Approach 2: Venture among the crowd
Reprint from Ivey Business Journal
[© Reprinted and used by permission of the Ivey Business School]